ShopAstro, a cross-border e-commerce platform, completes USD 10 million Series A financing

As the big sellers of products are on the road to financing and listing, cross-border service providers have also started their journey of financing and listing. Under the influence of Amazon’s account suspension last year, many sellers have begun to seek independent station platforms to reduce operational risks.

However, it is not that easy to build a website by yourself, so a number of one-stop SaaS e-commerce service platforms have emerged in China . These e-commerce service platforms can provide one-stop solutions for cross-border sellers from customer acquisition, website building, advertising, ordering, logistics, and payment.

At the same time, using independent website building SaaS as the entry point, it provides brand overseas sellers with a one-stop full-link overseas solution, and relies on big data and AI technology to help sellers refine operations and improve traffic conversion rates.

ShopAstro is such a platform. It is understood that it was established in 2021 and is headquartered in Hangzhou. It has branches in Shenzhen, Xiamen and Yiwu. It currently serves hundreds of customers.

According to public information from Tianyancha, ShopAstro had completed its angel round of financing in September 2021. At the end of March 2022, the company completed a US$10 million Series A financing, led by Hillhouse Capital, with angel round investors Blue Lake Capital and Shenjin Capital continuing to make additional investments.

Compared with third-party e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Wish, the most difficult thing for sellers to do with independent websites is to attract traffic. Generally, independent websites will attract traffic to their own independent websites through social media, email marketing, major search engines, alliances or Internet celebrities, and then promote traffic conversion. From this perspective, the cost and difficulty of acquiring customers for independent websites are much higher than those of third-party e-commerce platforms.

However, some cross-border professionals have questioned this business model, saying that by operating an independent website in this way, sellers still display their store, product and other data to third parties, which cannot be considered a true "independent website". In addition, some search engines are not very friendly to SaaS platforms, which will weaken the weight of related platforms.

Cross-border service providers

Financing