Shopify is based in Canada and powers more than 10 percent of e-commerce businesses in the United States. Australia and the United Kingdom are the other two major countries, where merchants prefer the Canadian e-commerce platform over market alternatives. However, Shopify has its focus set on e-commerce expansion to Asian countries.
While thousands of online stores are powered by Shopify in India, the company has now formed a strategic partnership with prominent Vietnamese e-wallet ZaloPay to drive e-commerce growth in Vietnam. ZaloPay is part of the VNG Corporation digital ecosystem, which helps consumers to transfer money and pay for goods through QR codes in Vietnam.
With technical resources and a large network of partners, ZaloPay wishes to become a bridge between Shopify and businesses in Vietnam. We believe that accompanying Shopify will be an important step for ZaloPay to introduce and replicate the e-commerce website model ‘Brand.com’ in the business community in Vietnam.
Le Lan Chi, General Director, ZaloPay
How it Helps?
ZaloPay is the first e-wallet company from Vietnam to join Shopify as a partner payment gateway. Shopify has multiple payment solutions to protect its merchants from fraudulent transactions. In April, Shopify welcomes Vesta Pay to its payments ecosystem for merchants from the US, Canada and Mexico. In December 2022, a Canada-based FinTech company OTT Pay launched an integrated payment feature on Shopify. It serves as a reliable and secure gateway for both shoppers and merchants, thus facilitating transactions.
Earlier, Shopify partnered with leading payment companies Payoneer, PayGlocal and Tazapay to help its India-based merchant partners. The collaboration is meant to ease cross-border commerce for Indian merchants by lowering transaction fees, facilitating international payments and offering stronger conversion.
“Reliable payments are a key enabler for merchants to go global effortlessly. Since cross-border transactions form an invaluable share of business for Shopify India merchants, we’ve collaborated with Payoneer, PayGlocal and Tazapay in a bid to make international payments seamless and more cost-effective,” Bharati Balakrishnan, India Country Head and Director at Shopify said.
“Our partnership offers multiple benefits for our merchants, including quicker settlement, better chargeback protection, a native risk engine built to prevent fraudulent transactions, and additional local support,” she added.
Helping Vietnam Grow
According to the regional media, Vietnamese e-commerce growth depends on logistics and payment infrastructure. Shopify aims to help the country grow its digital economy at a higher pace with solutions like ZaloPay. With the help of the strategic partnership, ZaloPay and Shopify aim to assist the promotion of the ‘Brand.com’ website model in Vietnam. It means that the goal is to empower independent sellers.
Shopify also offers solutions like Shopify Markets Pro and Shopify Translate & Adapt to help local merchants sell their products across the globe. Shopify Markets Pro helps them expand their business globally by covering more than 150 countries. Shopify Translate & Adapt, on the other hand, localizes the customer journey to boost international selling chances for merchants.
With the ‘Brand.com’ website model, the Vietnamese e-commerce market plan to reduce dependence on major e-commerce marketplaces. Shopify provides the required infrastructure for building online stores with little investment and no prior knowledge of coding. The Canadian company not only helps merchants to get started but also assists them to grow, market and operate retail business operations with much ease.
More than 40,000 app developers, theme designers and agency partners are part of the ecosystem that assists merchants sell online products. In 2021, the Partners ecosystem helped Shopify make a revenue of $32 billion. “$32 billion. That’s how much revenue the @ShopifyPartners ecosystem generated in 2021. That’s up 45% from 2020 and nearly 7x Shopify’s 2021 revenue – and we’re proud of their success,” Shopify Presiden Harley Finkelstein confirmed in a tweet.
Connecting Merchants with Shopify
According to the General Director of ZaloPay, Le Lan Chi, the e-wallet company wishes to bridge the gap between Shopify and Vietnam-based online businesses. Reiterating the ‘Brand.com’ model, she hopes to connect with more partners like Shopify for the country’s e-commerce growth.
“With technical resources and a large network of partners, ZaloPay wishes to become a bridge between Shopify and businesses in Vietnam. We believe that accompanying Shopify will be an important step for ZaloPay to introduce and replicate the e-commerce website model ‘Brand.com’ in the business community in Vietnam. At the same time, ZaloPay also hopes to connect more with new partners, who are brands that are operating extremely exciting e-commerce on Shopify platform,” Le Lan Chi said.
ZaloPay takes pride in becoming the first Vietnamese e-wallet to join Shopify’s payment system. “I’m proud to announce that ZaloPay is the first e-wallet in Vietnam to team up with Shopify to support brands in Vietnam bring e-commerce and cashless payment to more and more users,” Le Lan Chi said in a LinkedIn post.
Shopify’s Faith
Shopify has full faith in ZaloPay’s potential and impact in the regional market. Shopify’s Southeast Asia and India regional director, Bharati Balakrishnan sees an enormous rise in e-commerce businesses based in Vietnam. She believes that payments play a key role to assist online businesses.
Commenting on the partnership, Balakrishnan said ZaloPay is the best alliance to provide a consumer-friendly experience to Vietnamese merchants. “More and more businesses in Vietnam are realizing the benefits of e-commerce to drive growth, and we’ve seen the digital growth grow. Number of merchants in Vietnam use Shopify to accelerate their online business. Payments are an integral part of the online commerce journey. We are delighted to be partnering with a leading local e-wallet like ZaloPay to deliver a more consumer-friendly experience for our merchants,” she added.
Vietnamese Department of Ecommerce and Digital Economy, which comes under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, claims that online businesses in Vietnam rose by 43 percent in 2021. More than 4000 websites are registered with the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Out of all, 44.4 percent are engaged in online sales functions.
Other Asian Markets
Apart from Vietnam, Shopify has its focus set on local support and resources for Indian merchants as well. In March, Balakrishnan said in an interview with Financial Express’s BrandWagon Online that Shopify sees a huge opportunity to help Indian merchants to adapt to the current digital environment and help them grow.
Shopify has been present in India for around 10 years. It was around 2010-2012 that the company started its operations in the country. However, during its first five years, it worked as a partner ecosystem helping merchants to mark their online presence.
“In 2015, e-commerce in India hit a $10 billion annual GMV sort of number and we saw the first D2C brands emerge, which are now iconic household names. In 2018, e-commerce became a $25 billion market. As a result, two things happened — many new categories were born,” Balakrishnan said.
“That led to more D2C brands being born first online. So, categories like fitness accessories, costume jewelry, fitness, clothing, plus clothing, which were really niche, and did not really take what wouldn’t really consider large online suddenly started becoming big. In all this, the next thing that happened was a lot of traditional brands which were offline first started taking e-commerce very seriously,” she added.
