Innovative Solutions for Modern Merchants with Shopline's Christopher Yang

Brent Peterson (00:01.704) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Christopher Yang. He is the co-president of Shopline. Christopher, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Christopher Yang (00:15.18) Thank you, Brand. A pleasure to be here with you today. So I've been very fortunate to spend most of my career immersed in the e-commerce industry, working across the tech, the brand, and the agency sides of the business. So early on, I had the privilege of helping and launching scale iconic brands like Juicy Couture, Spider, Actors, Sports. seven for all, all mankind, J band, J brand, just to name a few. so these roles really offer me an invaluable insights into what it takes to build and grow a brand, brands in a competitive market. Most recently I was at Away, where I played a pivotal role in driving growth and scaling the well-known, did you see. I've sound like a friend. This experience exposed me to the complexity of scaling internationally, optimizing fulfillment, and building deep connections with customers in a fast moving digital world. So through these roles, I developed a first-hand understanding of the challenges that systems face, it is grappling with the intricacies of global logistics, building a recognizable brand and identity. or creating a frictionless customer experience. So these experiences not only taught me the technical and strategic aspects of e-commerce, but really also deepened my empathy for merchants. That empathy, along with my desire to find scalable solutions really led me to Shopline today. Here I focus on creating tools and strategies that empower businesses to navigate challenges like international expansion, customer engagement, and operational efficiencies. It is incredibly rewarding to help merchants thrive in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. When you ask about my passion, guess one of the things I really enjoy most is building SaaS products that make a tangible difference for merchants, particularly. Whether it is enabling a small business to scale faster. Christopher Yang (02:34.474) helping the brand streamline its operations or creating a deeper connections between merchants and their customers. I find immense satisfaction in developing solutions that are transformative, not just functional. And really beyond technology, I'm deeply committed to values like integrity, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability. At Shopline, We're here to support different initiatives such as like AAPI community events, woman in tech programs, and project that reduce energy consumptions in data centers and warehouses. And we all know sustainability is especially important to all of us. It comes as a sector with a significant environmental footprint from packaging to logistic. At Shopline, we're addressing this by helping merchants improve inventory forecasting, reduce returns, and minimize waste. For me, the goal is to build not just a better e-commerce platform, but a more inclusive and sustainable ecosystem that benefits everyone, businesses, customers, and most importantly, the planet. Brent Peterson (03:53.174) That's great. Thank you so much for that. That's that's awesome. So Christopher before we do get started You did volunteer to be part of the free joke project and I'm just gonna tell you a joke All you have to do is give me a rating one through five So here we go last week. I stayed at a terrible hotel called the fiddle. It was a vile inn Christopher Yang (04:15.969) Is that it? Okay. Brent Peterson (04:19.238) That's it, sorry. Yeah, I didn't say they were gonna be funny. So just the fiddle is a violin, violin. Yeah, it's pretty bad, sorry. Christopher Yang (04:28.053) Yeah. Do I still have to rate it? I think it's pretty decent after explaining it. I think it's definitely above average. Brent Peterson (04:39.166) All right, thank you. All right, so let's dive into ShopLine. So there is a lot of SaaS e-commerce platforms out there. What differentiates ShopLine from some of the others? Christopher Yang (04:51.98) Thank you for the great question. So ShopLine really focused on three core areas to address the most pressing challenges for merchants today. Scalability, performance, and efficiency. So let me dive into each one of these. So scalability. While starting a business has become more accessible, scalability effectively remains a significant challenge. Merchants faces obstacles like rising advertising costs, navigating new markets, and integrating new sales channels. So ShopBind really simplifies these processes with tools designed for international expansion, like our MCC product for marketplace integrations and data-driven traffic generation strategies by integrating you with different social and ad channels. Second, performance. Modern consumers expect highly personalized shopping experiences. Our platform offers features like email and SMS automation, pop-ups, on-page pop-ups, loyalty reward programs, and social commerce capabilities. So by leveraging first-party and zero-party data, merchants can now create tailored experiences that build customer loyalty and drive conversions. And finally, efficiency. Building and managing the full-size e-commerce operation can be costly and time intensive, especially with reliance on multiple third-party apps. Shopline provides a fully integrated, all-in-one platform that reduces these costs, streamlines workflow, and ensures a seamless experience for both merchants and their customers. So these solutions are designed to address not just the immediate challenges merchants face today, but also future-proof their businesses for a long-term growth. Brent Peterson (06:50.878) One thing you mentioned in your intro was your experience at Away and expanding into international markets. Besides the international market expansion, how are your customers aligning or driving your innovation at ShopLine? What are they doing to help you understand what more and more customers need? Christopher Yang (07:12.235) Well, there are tons of needs from how to lower the customer acquisition costs, so international expansion just being one. But there are multiple ways in terms of expanding into different sales channels. These could be social commerce or live sellings or marketplaces. How do you create a much more seamless online, offline, army channel experiences? So we get tons of these feedback from our merchants. all day long. Brent Peterson (07:44.519) What do you see as challenges right now for merchants in e-commerce? Christopher Yang (07:51.294) So I think today's consumer expects more than just a transactional experience, They're looking for a seamless, personalized interaction across every touch point, right? From social media to mobile to brick and motors, media needs demand is critical for brand to remain competitive. At ShopLine, we've developed tools that empower merchants to meet these challenges. For example, in categories like skincare or fashion, right? A customer often wants to procure or purchase product tailored to their specific needs, whether that's sustainability, price point, or functionality. A platform uses data-driven insights to help merchants create hyper-personalized, army-channel experiences. And this personalization not only enhances customer satisfaction, but also reduces buyer remorse and fosters long-term loyalty. I'll get little bit into that. But overall, we need to kind of progress the customer from a new customer all the way to a loyal customer within our platform. By enabling Merchant to differentiate their offering and create meaningful customer connections, we're really helping stand out in a crowded marketplace. And to kind of just... Diving a little bit deeper, The e-commerce industry continues to grow rapidly, right? But the growth presents significant challenges. So two major ones that really stand out, right? So one is rising consumer expectations. Shopper duty are more selective and sophisticated than ever before. They expect brands to anticipate their needs and deliver seamless, highly tailored experiences, as I mentioned earlier. across multiple platforms, not just one, not just their D2C site. Meeting these expectations require merchants to adopt data-driven, customer-centric strategies that can adapt quickly to changing consumer behaviors. Second is the market saturation issue, with countless products and brands competing for attention today. Differentiation can become increasingly difficult. Merchants need innovative tools. Christopher Yang (10:13.633) and strategy to stand out and create meaningful customer interactions and build lasting loyalty. To really address these challenges, Shopline provide a comprehensive marketing all-in-one tool that significantly enhance engagement and conversions. This tool empowers merchants with features such as subscription pop-up, countdown timers, automatic free shipping discounts and tools to launch limited time promotions as one part. Additionally, our advanced component library includes highly customizable no-code solution tailored to their specific industries. For example, we have this before and after slider for skincare product to showcase their efficacy. We have shopable images for home furnishings enabling seamless product discovery. Then we have like product comparison tools for like electronics buyer in aiding their decision making. So these innovative, like I would say advanced component libraries really allow merchants to create engaging, differentiable shopping experiences, helping them to stay ahead of the competition while building stronger connections with their customers. Brent Peterson (11:41.994) I know you mentioned no code and I think no code is going to be the big buzzword for this coming year in the future where we don't have to worry about hiring a developer. We don't have to have so many developers involved in the process. Tell us a little bit about why you've kind of leaned into that no code environment and how those are really going to help to drive ROI for the client. Christopher Yang (12:07.455) So as we observe the e-commerce industry trend, more and more companies are moving toward a SaaS platform for obvious reasons, cost reduction, reduction in maintenance costs, and also be able to tap into a robust e-commerce roadmap that that could scale, allowing them to scale effectively. So, no code is just a part of that. So, there's really no reasons for merchant to reinvent the wheel when commerce platforms have really existed for decades. spending time building your shopping cart, your store firm, your PDP, your PLP is really not where you should be spending your time and money. Instead, you should be spending your effort in building your brand, your marketing strategies and, things that are more differentiable, like to, make sure you could compete in this highly saturated marketplace. So this is, think, more so a trend, right? And, and, and investing in no-co is really the direction shop, I'm is heading in the future. Brent Peterson (13:24.648) How do you see AI playing a role in ShopLine's future and integrating tools that help clients or merchants make better experiences? Christopher Yang (13:38.7) So we're really focused on enhancing our platform with features like AI-driven personalization, advanced analytics, and improved payment solutions through AI as well. So having these going to be the differentiations, obviously not just hitting the e-commerce industry, but across the bigger spectrum as well. So we feel that this is where we're going to continue to make the investments, really in three different areas. So one is continue to use data and AI to improve what the merchants care the most, conversion rates, repurchase rates, AOV, reducing return rates. And second is we want to continue to use AI to empower e-commerce operations to making sure that we can effectively reduce human labor. lowering the cost of entering or writing product descriptions, automating a lot of workflow that could be really streamlined for AI. And most importantly, that using the analytics to better serve our customers. create a much better engagement. We have an AI tool today that really enables customer success or customer support agents to automatically cross-sell, upsell product through different chat channels based on previous chat history and purchase history of a particular customers. So all of these are things that we're investing. in making the overall economic experience better for our customers. Brent Peterson (15:29.618) What is your typical ideal customer to come onto Shopline? Christopher Yang (15:37.046) So as I mentioned earlier, we are an OEM platform. that are very deep in terms of addressing some of our merchants' industry needs. So obviously, serve merchants of all sizes. But I think what we're going to shine is really targeting our solutions toward merchants who have immediate needs and looking for all-in-one solutions that we can bring competitive advantage across all spectrum from Let's say if you need loyalty reward, you need a SMS email marketing tool, you need a promise platform, you need a mobile application and appeal with an integrated view of your online and offline sales. We got all that all hooked up, all connected together. in an all in one solution actually is built to where your industry needs, whether no matter where you are, you could be in fashion apparel, you could be in health and beauty, you could be in home and garden industries, right? So we actually built the right solutions so you don't have to go through this decision making analysis for Alice's issue and then really be able to get your business going tomorrow. Brent Peterson (16:52.118) You mentioned earlier international expansion and how ShopLine has been successful in Not comparing to other platform names, but what advantages do you have in terms of getting somebody into multiple markets over some of the other platforms? Christopher Yang (17:11.359) That's also a great question. That's another competitive advantage that we possess, right? The ability to sell internationally with a single site, the ability to do multiple currency conversion for you and you as a merchant will be able to receive USD in returns is really took it to be true, right? You don't have to worry about currency conversion, language conversions. We've got that all out of the box, right? And not to mention that we have underground support in various different countries and regions across the world, including APAC, we have Hong Kong, Taiwan. and also the Greater China area. And outside of that, we're operating in Japan, Australia, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, just to name a few countries and regions. And in those areas, we also have, I would say, integration with local payments, integrations with local logistics, integration with local specific marketplaces so you can sync up all your inventories and product descriptions across the spectrum. So this is part of reason that you should choose a global, choose an e-commerce platform company that has global footprint. Brent Peterson (18:32.254) I think some people may not have heard of ShopLine, but ShopLine actually has quite a broad reach. Are you expanding into regions that other people now that are you introducing yourself into other regions? What's your biggest region that you're most excited about? Christopher Yang (18:52.418) Obviously the United States is one of the biggest, if not the biggest economy in the world and possibly the largest e-commerce, I would say, regions in the world as well. So we have high hope. This is where we are doubling down or continue to invest our resources to make sure that we can provide the right technology solutions that has so-called the local product market fit in the US, making sure that we can continue to enable our merchant to succeed both domestically within US and internationally through other different sales channels. Brent Peterson (19:33.373) What are your goals for Shopline right now, both long term and short term? Christopher Yang (19:37.538) This is great question. I think in short term, we're looking to continue to enhance our solution offering, making sure that we are adjusting all of our customers' needs, our merchants' needs. We're focused on enhancing our platform for AI, as mentioned. And we're expanding into key global markets to give our merchants the tools that they need to scale efficiently and effectively. Long term, our vision is to redefine commerce by making shopping more intuitive, personalized, and more importantly, customer centric. We aim to empower merchants to build stronger and more meaningful connections with their customers, enabling sustainable growth. At the same time, we're investing in cutting-edge technologies like automations, predictive analytics, to help businesses stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape. Ultimately, our goal is to be the best all-in-one customer engagement at ecommerce platform, helping our merchants to see at every stage of their journey. Brent Peterson (20:46.59) What is your predictions for this coming year in terms of e-commerce? I know that AI is gonna change things all the time, but what do you see as exciting this coming year, 2025? Christopher Yang (21:04.053) So for merchants, the focus will shift significantly to efficiency and scalability, right? And technology being the forefront that streamlines operations, reduce waste, fossil fuel connections, and e-commerce merchants will be raising their focus on finding higher margin, creating better repurchase rate. and then really creating better lifetime values for their business rates. At the same time, sustainability will take the center stage. This is one and probably most important cause in European and North American regions. Consumer and regulators alike are demanding more eco-friendly solutions, pushing businesses to adopt practices such as sustainable packaging, optimized logistics, and waste reduction strategies. So similarly, at ShopLine, we're heavily investing in these areas. Our goal is to equip merchants with cutting-edge tools and insights that allow them to thrive in this evolving landscape while delivering meaningful and sustainable shopping experience for their customers. Brent Peterson (22:25.214) In terms of, you've mentioned sustainability a couple times. What do you see as the big target areas for 2025 when it comes to customers who are asking to be more sustainable or asking you to help them to be more sustainable? Christopher Yang (22:28.747) Mm-hmm. Christopher Yang (22:42.722) I think it's too full, right? Obviously the end consumers are looking for better ways to help the environment, right? So the retail program could be huge, already huge for a lot of different retailers. It could be even bigger. And better ways in terms of... saving energies, right? So how can we be more efficient in terms of operating our data farms, server farms, and also our logistics in terms of warehousing? How can we enable merchants to be on the merchant side? How do we enable merchants to be more environmental friendly and providing the right technology and tools in terms of reducing waste? and reducing returns due to errors. So all these are initiatives that we're looking to solve for both the merchants and their customers. Brent Peterson (23:43.102) Outside of what you're offering, you do offer apps or plugins. Tell us about your ecosystem and how the app store would help merchants to succeed in niche areas that an app would cover. Christopher Yang (24:00.096) So as I mentioned earlier, being an OEM platform doesn't mean that we're not relying on the rest of the ecosystem. It's just that we have a curated set of apps that work extremely well with each other. And underneath the data layer, these apps can freely transmit or send data back and forth. So we're really creating a fully integrated data layer that has all the triggers for automation to work seamlessly. So we'll be able to create better customer segments and send out much more personalized offers based on some of the review data, the return and exchange data, and some of the loyalty reward data, and how well they are interacting with our sites and also some of the purchase history. So all these could be factoring. And through AEI, we could do a much better job in terms of recommending the right product and offering to the customers. Brent Peterson (25:08.446) Earlier you had mentioned the ability to offer multi-language, multi-country through one website. Tell us, and I know there's a website that claims to do that, but they don't really. Tell us the difference between the way that it works at Shopline and maybe some of your competitors, how they would accomplish that problem. Christopher Yang (25:33.666) of great questions, right? I think there's definitely a lot of similarity. There are a lot of solutions out there addressing internationalization problem slash challenge, right? But we do so in a much more elegant way, right? In Away that first of all, we are a lot more performant. are low speed, side speed is a lot more robust versus some of our competitors, given how complex it is to do, multinational and multi-language, multi-currency transactions. second is that, we are second is that we are allowing, or the, the different e-commerce platform or different, we're allowing the different, different e-commerce websites to. host different storefront and content, per language per locale. Right. So the, the front end look and feel could varies from, a UK site to a US site to Australian sites. Right. And so you're not kind of buying to a specific look and feel, we're actually creating a unique experience, for the different countries and regions where you operate it. So I think those are a couple of key differentiations we have today. Brent Peterson (26:58.302) What innovations have you seen that clients have done that you're surprised at? Christopher Yang (27:09.633) I think it's, I'm constantly surprised. Well, we're constantly surprised by the competitions, but that is also a motivation to propel us, right? Continue to innovate, right? So we, we, we're operating a very saturated space with a lot of big players, especially in North America. I think one thing we do is really to remain nimble. And I think there's just too many to name in terms of innovations out there. We don't claim ourselves as being good at every single aspect or every single fronts. But we pride ourselves to be probably the best all-in-one solution that really address a customer's or a merchant's needs. And we all know that not just because you have more features or functionalities, you are the best platform. Ultimately, only 20 % of the features are. being utilized by a merchant and customer for any SaaS product or B2B SaaS product that's out there. So what's unique and what's important is really how you can find the right 20 % for retail rules, 20 80 rules. So how can you find the right solution offering that's important for your merchants, your customers, and really solve their pain points? And that's what we're really are seeking to do. Brent Peterson (28:47.23) Yeah, I'm sorry, I should have been more specific on the question. I meant your customers are coming up with all kinds of fun solutions. Have you seen anything that surprised you that your merchants, your customers are doing on ShopLine? Is there any niche or market that surprised you? Christopher Yang (29:03.275) Christopher Yang (29:08.693) I think that that's also a loaded question, but they are actually a lot, right? So we have a whole lot of, CPG and health and beauty customers that are doing subscription, right. And different ways of, in terms of activating the, their customer and for them to opting into, different subscription models. Right. So we all know that, subscription business is great. probably the best for. and online retailer. So we've seen a whole bunch of different promotion logics that's kind of built into our platform. And they're being leveraging different events component in terms of off-selling and cross-selling. So I think that's one way. And there are different ways in terms of bundling. check out by including smaller samples and free gifts and then along with that trying to upsell the customer into a subscription model especially in health and beauty. Other than that there's more complex discounts and bundling logic being put in place for fast fashion vertical right so Fast fashion, obviously we know there's quick turnaround in terms of their styles and inventories, right? So there's a lot of promotion needed in terms of bundling some of these SKUs. And so they've been leveraging some of our events component libraries as well in terms of bringing different SKUs and product into the shopping cart. And to make sure that... you reach is the customer reaches the minimum shipping threshold. They could be a hundred dollar or more. So you get free shipping or they could be more complex, discounting, discounting logic, like buy and get the next one free or half off. Right. So a lot of these requests, requests coming from our customer, we take them very seriously and, and carefully build them into our core product. And today make it very Christopher Yang (31:28.211) I would say, differentiable in Away. I could say that most of our other competitors probably don't have as robust of a discounting and promoting and stackable logic that we have today that could do it in a relative fast and efficient way without, I would say, customer experience. Brent Peterson (31:50.654) If you were to make a prediction on Black Friday 2025, what is the innovation that's going to be new at the end of this coming year, at the end of this year? Christopher Yang (32:08.609) in terms of shop line or or overall. Brent Peterson (32:11.602) Yeah, and either one, either in general e-commerce or in shop line. If there are any secrets you can kind of share that are coming out, let us know. Christopher Yang (32:21.473) I think you're less likely to see groundbreaking features in e-commerce given it's been around, like shopping online, buying online hasn't been. the next big thing for a while, right? but it's more around integration with different devices, different ways of shopping. Obviously, AI, AR being really big and even the reason C is they've showcased a lot of different AR goggles that could, with shopping capabilities. I think it's still gonna be a long way until that becomes mainstream, right? People are still going to buy on their mobile phone and desktop and then at a brick and mortar store, in a brick and mortar stores, still for some of the products. But definitely that's, there is a trend going more AI, AR, IoT type of shoppings. And then I think in 2025 specifically is still going to be more around shopping channels, right, in terms of innovations. I think there's going to be more in terms of, I would say, live shopping going into North America, right? This is spinning around for some time in APAC and... People start recognizing the benefits of using live selling and social selling for some of the products that are like supplements product, health and beauty products that require demonstrations. And more importantly, when I mentioned about subscription earlier, right? So these products does have a higher, I would say, customer lifetime value, which really allows Christopher Yang (34:14.005) higher upfront costs in terms of acquiring these customers, which makes life's enticing channel as well. So I think that's gonna be a new trend in North America. It's gonna pick up pretty rapidly with the rise of TikTok as well, TikTok shop. They've been one of our global partners as well. Brent Peterson (34:34.967) That's great Christopher as we close out the podcast I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want What would you like to plug today? Christopher Yang (34:45.588) I think if you're looking for the next up and coming e-commerce solutions in North America. shop line is definitely one that you should really explore right without patting on my back or my shoulder too much. There's definitely a lot that we offer out of the box right. We help you save a lot of operation costs as I explore early on but more importantly people are looking for premium product and we pride ourselves as one of the best for many different industry verticals. we build the right solution. We are customer centric, customer focused. We look at addressing pain points other than just presenting and offering features. And that's the biggest differentiation between us and the rest of the ecosystem, the rest of the SaaS marketplace. Brent Peterson (35:42.184) That's great. Christopher Yang is the co-president of Shopline. Christopher, how would people get in touch with you if they'd like to talk to you? Christopher Yang (35:52.014) definitely, would like to share more of my personal advice and, I could be found on LinkedIn, or if you have more product or service related questions, you could go online to www.shopline.com, www shopline.com. you'll find out more information about us. Thank you, Brent. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Brent Peterson (36:10.216) That's awesome. That's great. Thank you so much for being here today.