Shopline Review: What Does This eCommerce Platform Have to Offer?

By the end of 2022, the global eCommerce market is expected to grow to a staggering $5.55 trillion – that's a lot of dough! However, this is hardly surprising, considering online shopping is inextricable from our modern existence.

In light of that, it's no wonder that entrepreneurs are frequently finding new eCommerce-related opportunities to turn their passion into a living online. However, the right eCommerce platform is imperative to succeed in this venture.

That's why today we're reviewing one such option: Shopline.

In this Shopline review, we’ll cover the platform’s key features, pricing, and customer support to help determine whether it's the right option for your new online store.

Let’s get started!

Shopline Review: About Shopline

Simply put, Shopline is a global ecommerce platform designed for users wanting to launch an online store without coding know-how. Since its founding in 2013, it's become the go-to choice for over 350,000 brands worldwide. 

As a sales solution, Shopline appeals to a wide variety of businesses. It offers B2B-related features, dropshipping with AliExpress, live streaming, and social media capabilities, allowing you to expand your business in more ways than one. 

To kickstart the creation of your online store, you start with a simple template, which you can then customize with Shopline’s drag-and-drop editor. 

Shopline Review: Shopline’s Main Capabilities

When successfully running an online store, you have to sell products and process payments. You also need to market your items, engage with your audience, and monitor your performance using powerful analytics.

With that said, let’s take a look at how Shopline’s key features stack up:

Store Creation

Create an online store without hassle with Shopline’s intuitive drag-and-drop website builder. But first, you need to pick a theme to lay a good-looking framework for your website that you can then modify to transform into your own. There are over 20 themes to choose from, inspired by various industries.

Once you’ve selected your theme, it’s time to edit it. You can choose fonts, change your website’s color scheme, add content, customize images, and more. You can even add functionality like mega navigation, product filters, and featured products and collections.

Customization, however, is quite limiting. You can only drag elements to where the page builder allows them, indicated by a green area. You can edit features from a sidebar, adjust widgets, and edit your footer and header. But there are few customization options beyond swapping colors or fonts.

However, at this point, we want to add that Shopline’s online stores are built for global audiences and, as such, support multiple languages and currencies. Plus, it’s also pretty easy to migrate your current online store from other platforms – so that’s a plus! 

Live Streaming

Interestingly, 53% of businesses already stream live videos once a week. With Shopline, it’s pretty easy to jump on the bandwagon.

Shopline enables you to go live and sell on social media. Shopline Live Integrates with Facebook Live to allow you to create custom live streams. For instance, you can set up live stream chats to automatically detect keywords and assign them ‘actions.’This is handy if you enable customers to place orders inside the chat.

You can choose which products to highlight during your live stream, manage your order keywords, and create polls. You can also set up prize draws. Here you can determine how many winners you wish to award and the correct answer customers should write in the chat. Then Shopline picks a winner and displays instructions on how customers should get in touch!

Of course, you’ll also be able to manage your audience if necessary by blocklisting or muting users. Last but not least, you can also include a checkout reminder in your lives to help drive conversions!

Product Management

You can easily manage your products from ShopHub. This is your store management dashboard, where you’ll find all your product, order, and inventory details. Once you’ve digitally listed all your products in ShopHub, it becomes easy to manage and edit products. For instance, You can add and move products in bulk to publish to multiple sales channels. On top of that, you can also edit product information and synchronize these edits across all your sales channels.

You can also ‘lock’ your inventory to avoid overselling if stocks are running low. Finally, Shopline makes it simple to keep a clear merchandise overview in different locations. You can list your multiple stores and warehouses, keep track of their inventory separately, and optimize them accordingly. 

Marketing Management

Shopline comes with various marketing features to help you drive more conversions. For example, you can:

• Create coupons and discount codes 
• Display countdown timers to create a sense of urgency on your website
• Use affiliate links to transform loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

Sales Channel Management

Benefit from omnichannel selling by managing multiple sales channels simultaneously. As we’ve already hinted, Shopline allows you to synchronize your inventory and product details across numerous channels, including Lazada, Shopee, Bukalapak, Tiki, Tokopedia, and more.

Data Analytics

Shopline provides a real-time analytics dashboard that gives insights into customer data, traffic, marketing performance, which products sell best, etc. With this info to hand, you’re much better positioned to optimize your store. 

With Shopline’s Pro versions (more about pricing in a sec), you can review up to a year’s worth of data. You can also compare data from one period to another and evaluate analytics for specific pages on your site.

Client Management

Build customer loyalty with multi-tier reward systems. These give users more incentive to engage with your store by offering higher discounts to those customers with a higher score. In addition, you can set automatic upgrade conditions that promote shoppers to a higher tier after making a set number of purchases or reaching a total spending value. 

In addition, you can use affiliate links to reward those who spread the word about your products with a commission on the sale they generate. 

At this point, it’s worth noting that Shopline is currently working on expanding its customer management features. In the near future, they also plan to add customer groups that allow you to more accurately segment your audience, complete with group analytics.

Social Commerce

Shopline provides a wide range of tools to help you engage with your audience on social media. For example, you can conveniently manage your Facebook, TikTok, and Google ads from your Shopline dashboard. Shopline also provides a centralized messaging center from which you can answer your business correspondence. In addition, you can reply to and manage messages via Facebook, Instagram, and your website. That’s as well as managing comments on your Facebook Pages.

You can also synchronize your products to these social selling platforms and use Facebook’s Pixel to track your data across your website, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Lastly, for a smoother, more convenient customer experience, shoppers can also log into your online store using their Facebook accounts.

Dropshipping

Shopline makes it easier to interact with substantial dropshipping marketplaces like AliExpress. It offers a plugin called Shopline Catcher. This helps you select products from AliExpress and analyze product popularity from a sales and advertising perspective to find the best additions for your store. 

In addition, you can create automatic product listings and publish your chosen items in bulk. This makes it easy to quickly create a catalog of high-quality dropshipping products.

When a customer places an order, Shopline also automatically places this order with the appropriate AliExpress supplier, so you don’t have to approve anything manually.

B2B

B2B businesses will benefit from a few Shopline features that support wholesale selling. For instance, Shopline comes with a few online store and landing page templates explicitly designed for B2B businesses. 

You can also design your own inquiry forms with data linkage and generation. This allows you to identify existing customers by matching the data they enter into the inquiry form with data from your customer list. Each inquiry is added to a dedicated inquiry dashboard from which you can respond.

Lastly, with Shopline’s custom price feature, you can create tiered pricing and set minimum order quantities. This is great for companies offering services with multiple subscription tiers or have more complex order requirements.

Shopline Review: Shopline Integrations

Shopline integrates with a wide variety of socials and online shopping channels. Some of which include:

• TikTok
• Shopify
• Shopee
• Lazada
• Tiki
• WooCommerce
• Line
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Bukalapak
• Tokopedia

However, compared to other eCommerce platforms, native integrations (with apps that aren’t sales channels) are somewhat limited. In fact, outside that category, Shopline only integrates with MailChimp. So the only way to make the platform work with your extended tech stack is to program your own webhooks and API requests, for which documentation is available.

Shopline’s app store is currently under development. When completed, this feature will allow users to expand their shop's functionality with extra widgets and apps. For example, blogging features. 

Shopline Review: Pricing

Shopline is a SaaS, meaning you'll need to subscribe to a monthly or annual plan to access its services. However, yearly plans are only available for the three most expensive tiers, so the pricing quoted below is based on monthly billing.

However, before we dig into the nitty-gritty of each pricing plan, it’s worth highlighting that all packages come with:

• Analytics, with data visualization through graphs and charts
• Email marketing
• Abandoned card recovery
• A free SSL certificate
• SEO
• Free themes
• Policy templates
• Social commerce features
• Multiple languages and currency support, plus international domains
• Customer support 

Paying for a higher tier doesn’t unlock extra features. Instead, it reduces the transaction fees you pay on each sale your make. It also allows you to register more staff accounts.

Plans are as follows:

• Lite: $12 per month- You can only create a one-page store, register three staff accounts, and charge a 2% transaction fee.
• Starter: $29 per month- You can build a complete online store, register five staff accounts, and you’re charged a 2% transaction fee
• Essential: $69 per month (or $690 a year) – You can register ten staff accounts and charge a 0.80% transaction fee.
• Standard: $149 per month (or $1490 a year) – You can register 20 staff accounts and charge a 0.40% transaction fee. 
• Premium: $259 per month ($2590 a year) – You can register 100 staff accounts and charge a 0.20% transaction fee. 

Shopline Review: Customer Support

Shopline customer support via email. You can also access the team via live chat on the website from 10am to 7pm Monday to Friday. However, support hours vary by region, as Shopline has offices in seven different locations.

Additionally, you can browse the developer center to learn how to use Shopline’s API to develop your own apps. There’s also a comprehensive list of webhooks. 

Shopline also has an online knowledge base, but as this isn’t linked on their main website, it’s a little hard to find! Here you’ll find more information about each Shopline feature. That's as well as articles on topics like how to launch your store, set discounts and promotions, edit your settings, and much more. In addition, hundreds of articles on the knowledgebase make this a reasonably extensive self-help resource for anyone wanting to check out Shopline in more detail.

Shopline Review: Pros and Cons

Before we wrap up our Shopline Review, here are the key advantages and disadvantages we’ve identified.

Shopline Review: Our Final Verdict

All in all, we think Shopline is a simple-to-use eCommerce solution offering features for various merchants. Small businesses, dropshippers, B2B brands, and online retailers will all find features that cater to their needs. 

However, even though the platform’s nearly ten years of experience, it still lacks a range of features to compete with similar eCommerce solutions. For instance, there isn’t an app store, POS, or mobile app. On top of this, customization is minimal, with only 20 themes to choose from and little design freedom. Those that come from more flexible drag and drop editors like Wix will find Shopline very restrictive. 

That said, many of the features Shopline offers are helpful and intuitive. For example, live streaming is an excellent asset for businesses wanting to engage their audience in a new product launch. Plus, there is plenty of social selling and marketing capabilities built in. We also like that when it comes to omnichannel selling, Shopline makes synchronization and bulk editing incredibly easy.

Our final thoughts: If you want to check Shopline out, we recommend signing up for a free trial and researching the platform carefully to see if it meets your needs. Let us know what you think in the comments box below!