E-Commerce Platform SHOPLINE Powers Cross-Border Selling for Merchants on AWS

According to Statista, the global retail e-commerce market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.3 percent and higher in the next 5 years, with some regions even surpassing 14.6 percent. To help brands take advantage of this shift, SHOPLINE helps merchants get started with their own branded dotcom sites while providing omnichannel solutions to grow these stores to their full potential.

SHOPLINE initially adopted a region-based approach for its business deployment, but this approach posed several challenges. The services accessing each other resulted in frequent jitters and packet losses, leading to operational and management inefficiency. For example, if a store in Singapore needed to access product inventory data from a warehouse in China, the request had to pass through multiple data centres, resulting in delays and data loss. In addition, building its own internet data centre overseas was economically challenging, requiring inspection, management, and operations and maintenance.

To address these challenges, SHOPLINE sought a cloud provider with a global presence and globalised infrastructure. This would help reduce the costs of device deployment, operations and maintenance, unify local and overseas technology architectures, and build a highly serviceable and available system for future business growth. By partnering with a cloud provider with a strong market reputation, SHOPLINE will be able to overcome its initial deployment challenges and position itself for success in the global e-commerce market.

By selecting AWS, the company is able to fulfil its international ambitions with ease, and save on building its own data center. AWS's globalised infrastructure and technological support mean that SHOPLINE can focus on helping merchants build online stores while delivering low latency, high serviceability, and an improved user experience.

The combination of cloud services and end-to-end delivery capability offered by AWS satisfies SHOPLINE's complex and diverse business requirements. These include supporting merchants with multi-platform risk assessment and control, omnichannel traffic, and security and compliance readiness in their global selling endeavours.

Zhimeng Wang, vice-president for Technology, SHOPLINE, said, "AWS provides all that SHOPLINE requires, including an elastic and reliable infrastructure, cloud storage service, cloud computing, and a full range of resources and services, to support our merchants' cross-border ambitions."

SHOPLINE leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to run its infrastructure.

SHOPLINE uses a microservice architecture to support its diverse e-commerce needs, including building its stores, and managing its products, orders, members, marketing, and sales.

SHOPLINE runs on Amazon EC2 instance types to achieve elasticity and scalability, which allows the company to respond quickly to changing business demands. To further enhance the performance and reliability of its infrastructure, the company uses Amazon EBS for high-performance local storage.

To isolate and manage resources for each of its businesses, SHOPLINE deployed Amazon VPC to define and launch AWS resources. This structure allows the company to upgrade relevant VPCs in the event of a system upgrade, minimising any potential impact and ensuring the continued availability and serviceability of the system.

SHOPLINE's implementation of AWS has proven to be a successful strategy for delivering e-commerce solutions that meets its customers’ demands. 

With AWS’s global regions, SHOPLINE can effectively serve customers around the world - in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The company leverages Amazon CloudFront and AWS VPN to enable global data write-in and local access, ensuring fast and reliable access to its services. To ensure the smooth delivery of goods and alert merchants of any potential compliance risks, SHOPLINE has also built a risk control platform using Amazon EC2 high-performance instances and Amazon EBS with high I/O. The platform relies on Amazon S3 for static resource storage and Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network at the front end for better performance and reliability.

This makes SHOPLINE a top choice for merchants looking to open an online storefront quickly. AWS also provides SHOPLINE with a highly available and cost-effective infrastructure, through Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Route 53.

Powered by AWS, SHOPLINE has developed Smart Ads, an intelligent advertising system that uses combinatorial algorithms to make targeted recommendations that improve the return on ad spend (ROAS) and website conversion rate for its merchants. The company uses AWS Lambda to build lightweight computing tasks, providing merchants with compliance review and notification, image processing, and front-end rendering. The system generates and responds to landing pages of different styles for products, automatically tops bestsellers with high conversion rates, and offers automated optimization, ad on/off, and budget adjustment.

With its Smart Ads feature, SHOPLINE leverages AI-assisted marketing to maximise product exposure through major channels such as Meta and Google, allowing rapid ad release by accounts and in batches for omnichannel marketing success.

SHOPLINE has tapped on AWS Enterprise Support with 24x7 technical support for its critical workloads and an AWS Technical Account Manager (TAM) to provide SHOPLINE regular recommendations in operation excellence, security, and cost management. The AWS TAM also advises on Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) support for seasonal event promotions. By leveraging AWS's SLA-assured serviceability and Enterprise Support, SHOPLINE is able to provide highly available and serviceable support, ensuring success during major sales events such as Black Friday and Christmas.

“By eliminating risks before the sales events, SHOPLINE's merchant activities went smoothly, and we have been able to surpass our business goals. In reviews after the events, we also found areas to optimize and improve our architecture. We will continue to work with the TAM team to optimize our infrastructure,” said Guihong Wu, Operation Manager at SHOPLINE.

SHOPLINE has been able to expand its business overseas and shorten its product deployment cycle from six months to one month running on AWS. The company has also been able to better manage costs, including reducing idle hardware resources by using Amazon EC2 on-demand instances and avoiding adding additional O&M. This lets its O&M team focus on business needs and provide Chinese merchants with a more efficient user experience with lower latency.

According to Wang, SHOPLINE expects global traffic on its platform to surge as demand rises for faster and more effective global selling. This could drive up SHOPLINE’s data storage capacity and computing power. "At SHOPLINE, we recognize the value that AWS brings to the table — its top-notch CPU performance, robust computing capabilities, and strong edge node technology. We want to forge a closer partnership with AWS to empower merchants in the global e-commerce landscape."

Founded in 2013 and a member of the Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups accelerator in 2014, SHOPLINE is a leading smart commerce platform, offering solutions and services to merchants, empowering them to sell everywhere from anywhere. SHOPLINE operates offices in Greater China, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia. SHOPLINE has already helped over 500,000 merchants start and scale their retail businesses, reaching over 1.5 billion consumers. Its customers include brands such as Miniso, Linsy, AUKEY, Olympus, Moft, and MedSpa.

For more information, visit https://aws.amazon.com/retail.