How Shopify Can Help ASEAN eCommerce

Now before we even get into the creation of our first ASEAN focused eCommerce store we must set up the strong foundations, and understand How Shopify Can Help ASEAN eCommerce…

It Can:

Not only create great e-commerce stores, but to also validate your niche idea, and to help us make sure that we’re starting to journey in the right way…

And with these foundations our business is most likely to succeed;

So let’s start as we mean to go on with a little bit of effort and a lot of excitement.

So this is the foundational set up because we need to build that strong foundation,so first off:

What is Shopify? – Can I Use It In ASEAN Business?

Looking to set up a global e-commerce business?

Shopify might just be the way forward…

You see:

Shopify is almost like the e-commerce version of WordPress. It is the best eCommerce platform for beginners and experts alike (in my opinion), and it has loads of apps in the Shopify app store that can help you do so many things and that can be integrated into it…

And it’s going to save you so much time on marketing responsibilities…

The great thing is you can pretty much sell anything on Shopify; be a physical product, digital products, like ebooks, or software, and even dropshipping.

Dropshipping is the thing we’re going to be selling, well one of the things 🙂

So what we’re going to do first is to have a look at other stores that are actually using the Shopify Platform:

So we’re going to go to Google, and I’m going to type in site colon my shopify.com

Researching eCommerce Competition On Shopify

When we are Researching eCommerce Competition On Shopify this will give us a look at the amount of Shopify stores that there are but also the kind of products that people are selling

So, I want you to go to Google. Go to the country-specific Google of where you live if it is available. So if you are in Indonesia

The next step you need to do is search for :

site:myshopify.com on

This tells us the number of pages on Shopify Sites that are on the internet, a whopping 15 million two hundred thousand searches or sites associated with Shopify.com.

Let’s have a look at the first site: DotDotBang Store

So lets have a look at the homepage to see if we can get an idea of what might be workign well for them, and what is good to take note of.

eCommerce Currency Selection

I like having this available on your store, it gives people the option to shop in their own currency, increases trust and will help conversions, becasue no one really likes shopping in a currency they are unfamiliar with.

Free Shipping – The Word FREE Is Always Good!

Okay so free shipping on all US orders over $50, that’s pretty good, but maybe not for this niche as it could mean a lot of purchases, and because it’s cutesy-cutesy stuff, it is most likely aimed at the young teen market, I could be wrong.

I do like the Free “EXTRAS”… ummm, what are these Free Extras?

And also, I like the fact that they use a timed tactic, meaning that the offer won’t be there forever… LIMITED TIME OFFER

Homepage Video – Youtuber Review E-commerce Store

Videos are always good, especially if they have bags of social proof with them also, which is obviously the case here with this Youtuber Review of their Big Box of Squishies.

As you can see, whatever this person paid the social media personality was worth it, as they have nearly half a milllion views on that video, which some will have turned into purchases.

Social Media and Newsletter Signup

It’s always good to have ways of converting visitors into fans, or subscribers, but these buttons/sign-ups are a bit lost on the page, they could really have done better, and most likely have converted more visitors into fans, so that they could market to them again and again on different marketing mediums.

For me personally when I came to this website I was quite impressed, aprt from it’s oldskool design.

I didn’t want to see a huge pop-up straight away, which they didn’t use, which is great….

Leave those Entrance Pop-Ups Alone

Normally I would say to leave the entrance popups alone, but I kind of like this one (Chosen from a random Shopify Store), a chance to win a tent, a choice of a 2-4 man tent, which is pretty good.

I would do it a bit different though.

1. I would make it an exit pop up, so once a person has viewed our site, and they are leaving for whatever reason, then it pops up, to entice them to leave their details so we can market to them again.
2. I’d change the wording “Subscribe To Win” to something more catchy, like “Want To Win The Coolest Pop Up Tent”, or something similar.
3. I’d change the color of the SUBSCRIBE button, to something contrasting to the page and colors being used, maybe a bright Orange.
4. And, I’d add a subscribe with Facebook Option
5. And, maybe even, a share with your friends for an added entry option too.

I don’t want to see a pop up in front of my face straight away, so that is something that you want to make sure that you don’t have on your website.

Do Use An eCommerce Exit Popup

I like the way this website uses their exit pop up. Not only do they use the word FREE twice, but they also appeal to their audience, who are the outdoors type, with a great image, their button stands out and personally it didn’t waste my time (a big plus).

Let’s have a look at our next candidate on our list of sites, which is called Kore Essentials. I have looked at the site on my mobile device as this is where most of your potential customers from the ASEAN Region will come onto your site from.

Free Shipping On Orders Over $100

This is smack bang at the top of the page, but it could stand out a bit more, and also… on $100, they could have made a better offer…

Or even just said FREE SHIPPING on All Orders… then just fold the cost of the shipping into the cost of the product.

eCommerce Collections – Don’t Make Them Look Generic

Yep, they don’t stand out, it looks like stock imagery (which can work for some things, but everyone uses these images, so what would make a potential customer buy?)

The eCommerce Collection Button

(It’s on the right track)

It’s bright and orange, but it really doesn’t look very professional, it looks cheap and makes you lose trust for the website.

Be aware of all of these small little things, as these are what can make or break profits on your ASEAN e-commerce store.

Let’s dig a bit deeper

Using Shopify For Niche eCommerce Research

Let’s go niche, so, let’s choose a keyword to target and we are going to use Electric Bikes, so go to your google search bar and type in:

site:myshopify.com electric bikes

You will end up with something like the following. What you have done now is narrow down your research to be targeted to any myshopify.com shops that are online.

This search also gives us some great ideas for content to create, should we be looking to enter the niche for electric bikes.

Google tells us what questions people are asking, and when you see that, you know that Google rate it.

So electric bikes are an unusual one, but obviously a big market, and from a bit of research I see that the prices are very high from $950 to $1,116. Probably more expensive if I dig a bit deeper, or add more features.

Why You Need To Do eCommerce Research

So what I’m trying to give you is an idea of the different types of stores that are actually out there and how you can choose a niche for you to start creating your store in.

The thing with Shopify is if there is a market already out there, if you find a good product, you too can start selling on your own store.

All right, lets do another test, no matter what I type in here…. let’s go with something I am very interested about, Shopify Software.

As you can see I narrowed it down to very specific, I’ve used
Quotation marks in my search to make it a specific search phrase. And as you can see it has a very little number of 23 results, very niche.

And maybe something left for another day, but you start to see How Shopify Can Help ASEAN eCommerce to do research on niche markets and competition, just by simply knowing the search query:

site:myshopify.com

Using MyShopify For Dropshipping Research

Let’s look for something that we could potentially dropship. I chose the first thing that popped into my head, a “smart camping stove”

As you can see we got a good few search results here, so let’s look into the first site that appears…

So, I have gone into the site and found what I was looking for, the Smart Camping Stove, as you can see in the picture below:

It’s a cool looking contraption, and it costs 183,932 Cambodian Riel (as the currency automatically goes to the country I am in at present). That roughly works out as $45.99 USD.

I think that this is a product that could be sold well, and from the way I see this website doing it, they are missing out 0n many things that high converting e-commerce stores should do, especially in a ripe market like the ASEAN region.

For a start, they are just using a very very generic product page, it doesn’t stand out, there are no CTA’s (Call To Action), no striking, contrasting colors, and no scarcity or urgency involved in any of the pages to make a person want to buy that product right now!!

But now you know How Shopify Can Help ASEAN eCommerce stores to find great content, you will be able to start seeing what is right and wrong yourself, and not make these same mistakes.

Aliexpress for Dropshipping?

So, let’s have a look see if we can find it on the big dropshipping site, AliExpress.

I did a quick search on Ali for “Compact Camping Stove”…

If we took the third product in the line we can see that it is $11.89 – $16.14 with Free Shipping.

Doign soome simple maths, if we sold it for the $45.99 that the other website above is selling it for then, without marketing costs, we could potentially make a nice profit of somewhere around $30, per item sold.

With that kind of profit per item sold, how many of these do you reckon you might be able to sell?

So what we do is the following; we can potentially be getting those products from the likes of AliExpress and we will be Drop Shipping them.

What does Dropshipping Mean?

Basically, dropshipping is where we act almost like a middleman for product manufacturers, where we never touch the products, but we create a store, and we find the market.

Then once we sell them, the products delivered to our buyers, direct from the manufacturer, so we never touch them.

So what I want you to do in your own time is to go to site:myshopify.com and I want you to search for what it is that you are interested in.

Go on, starting researching now and find out How Shopify Can Help ASEAN eCommerce stores to make a great start in the ever expanding industry, start now…