The continuous growth of the e-commerce sector in Asia is no news! In the last 10 years, China, Taiwan, India, Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have emerged as one of the leading e-commerce markets in the world; with Business.com placing 3 Asian countries in the top 10 largest e-commerce markets in the world. At a population of about 4.6 billion, Asia accounts for a whopping 59% of the world’s population! The sheer size of Asia’s population has greatly spurred individuals and businesses to spread their reach to Asian countries, with China leading the pack.
The boom in Asia’s e-commerce sector has greatly improved the standard of living on the continent. With most brands in Asia having access to an e-commerce store, it has become easier for families to promote their products online and spread their reach beyond Asia.
E-commerce in Asia has come to stay, and the number of e-commerce platforms— After researching we came across this article: 電商平台比較: 台灣老闆該用哪一個平台開店聚集人潮與錢潮? Which has made it more than evident that our thoughts are correct.
You’ll see that it has has continued to rise. As the webpage eCommerce 台灣 points out, the highest-profile e-commerce platforms in Asia are Shopify, Woocommerce, and Webnode.
With multiple blogs, and websites recommending Shopify as the number one e-commerce platform on the planet, it comes as no surprise that it’s also starting to emerge as the top e-commerce platform across Asia. Valued at about $4 billion and with over 1.2million users and 500,000 businesses across 175 countries, Shopify is among the largest e-commerce platforms on the planet. Major brands across the world like Tesla Motors, General Electric, Nescafe, GitHub, and Encyclopedia Britannica all make use of Shopify’s platform; a testament to its credibility and functionality.
Here are a few reasons that explain why Shopify is thriving in Asia:
1.Specialized Themes and Templates
Like most e-commerce platforms, Shopify comes with store templates and themes to choose from. But unlike other e-commerce platforms, Shopify comes with themes and templates customized to suit the needs of the Asian markets. These themes are designed to support being formatted to Chinese—the most spoken language in Asia.
2.Built-in Blog
Blogging is not a word associated with eCommerce platforms, but Shopify integrates this with their software seamlessly. Over the years, blogs have proven very effective in driving organic traffic to different types of web pages, and the same applies to e-commerce stores.
With Shopify’s built-in blogs, sellers can create an online blog on their stores; write blog posts that target their customers, and add the option of comments, consequently improving the seller-customer relationship, and fostering smooth and easy transactions. In the Asian online space, blogging has also amassed a huge following. By integrating blogs, Shopify’s stores became more appealing to the average Asian.
3.Ease of Use
One of the major reasons people turn to e-commerce platforms, instead of website designers and developers when trying to get an online store is how easy and cost-effective it is to set up an online store on these platforms. While some e-commerce platforms might be a bit intricate to navigate, Shopify sticks to simplicity and ease. Although it is fairly limited in its customization options, uploading product details, and navigating the store builder is simple enough for the non-tech inclined user to understand.
4.Specialized Customer support services
Shopify provides a wide range of customer service integrations for its sellers and their customers. To fully cater to the needs of its Asian users, Shopify provides round the clock customer support that speaks the major languages in Asia, and fully supports Chinese in its admin services.
Shopify also allows the integration of WeChat— an Asia based messaging, social media, and mobile payment app, with over 1 billion users, to promote easy, and hassle-free communication between sellers, and their customers.
5.Built-in Payment Gateway
Shopify comes with its own secured payment gateway for seller-customer transactions. Beyond its inbuilt payment gateway, Shopify easily integrates with over 200 different payment gateways from across the world.
To promote its use across Asia, Shopify integrates with Alipay Global, AsiaPay, ALLINPAY, BitPay, and a host of other popular and trusted payment gateways.
6.Mobile Optimization
According to Oberlo, the percentage of traffic on the internet that comes from mobile devices is 52%! Meaning more than half of the world’s internet users come from smartphones and tablets.
The same metric translates to e-commerce platforms. Most customers browse through the online stores on Shopify with their smartphones. To fully take advantage of this, stores on Shopify are automatically optimized for mobile use. They are fully responsive, and the pages automatically adjust to fit mobile devices with different screen sizes.
7.Shopify Point of Sale
The last feature that has proved very useful in the growth of Shopify across Asia is Shopify point of sale. Shopify point of sale, also referred to as Shopify POS, is an application available on both Android and iOS, that can be used to make physical transactions at a local store. The Importance of Shopify POS is made very obvious in the Asian markets, where most sellers have physical stores, but also want to make sales online. Customers can simply purchase a product online and pay physically, or simply work into the physical stores to purchase and pay for the products. Details from Shopify POS and the online Shopify store, both synchronize seamlessly, making it very easy to manage all products from one dashboard.
In conclusion
The continuous boom in Asia’s e-commerce is definitely not slowing down anytime soon. Multiple analysts’ websites, including Solidiance, predict that Asia’s e-commerce revenue would surpass a whopping $1 trillion by the end of 2020!
Ecommerce platforms have played a major role in the growth of Asia’s e-commerce economy, and with other e-commerce platforms like Shopline, and WooCommerce spreading across the continent, the possibilities of growth are endless.