On October 29, 2024, the Alibaba Global Initiatives Reunion Summit was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. By bringing together industry experts and local businesses to discuss approaches for fostering a forward-thinking entrepreneurial climate in Ethiopia, this summit has opened doors to digital growth for entrepreneurs in the country.

Shoplazza, as a strategic partner of AliExpress in Ethiopia, was invited to attend this event. Shoplazza’s CTO, Xia Bing, shared at the meeting, enabling attendees to gain a better understanding of the development of e-commerce in Africa. He also elaborated on how the close cooperation between Shoplazza and AliExpress can help African merchants quickly launch their online retail ventures and effectively tap sales opportunities globally.

PrimeDrop launched by Shoplazza is the core highlight of this cooperation. Through this platform, businesses can start their own e-commerce businesses in just four steps and within only five minutes. First, use the rich and diverse themes of Shoplazza to build an eye-catching website. These themes have their own characteristics and reasonable layouts, which can quickly attract consumers’ attention. Merchants can choose appropriate themes according to the characteristics of the goods they sell and the preferences of the target customer group to create a unique e-commerce interface, laying a good foundation for business development.

Authorizing AliExpress in the Shoplazza backend is another key aspect of the two parties’ collaboration. It allows merchants to easily screen and import selected products from AliExpress in the Shoplazza backend. These products cover various fields, are abundant in quantity and of guaranteed quality. African e-commerce merchants can quickly enrich their product categories to meet the diversified shopping needs of local consumers, which undoubtedly adds a powerful weight to them in market competition.

Complex order processing in e-commerce business becomes simple and efficient under this model. Orders generated through a user’s e-commerce website will be automatically synchronized from the Shoplazza backend to AliExpress for processing. This automated process greatly improves the speed and accuracy of order processing, reduces the workload of merchants in order management, and enables them to devote more energy to other business processes.

Finally, with AliExpress’ robust warehousing management and logistics system, goods can be delivered to consumers safely and in a timely manner. This series of steps constitutes a complete and smooth e-commerce business process, providing great convenience for African e-commerce entrepreneurs.

On the front-end customer acquisition side, Shoplazza supports advertising marketing, data tracking and feedback of major advertising platforms such as TikTok, Google, and Meta. This provides African e-commerce practitioners with diversified marketing channels and precise marketing tools. They can conduct advertising through these platforms, adjust strategies in a timely manner according to data feedback, and more flexibly carry out e-commerce business to attract more potential customers.

On the back-end payment side, Shoplazza supports 12 African currencies in November and enables e-commerce payments for 13 African countries. This helps break the bottleneck of African e-commerce payment, create more favorable conditions for African merchants to conduct e-commerce business, and promote the further development of the African e-commerce market.

At the meeting, Alibaba Global Initiative (AGI) announced plans to establish a training center in Ethiopia to more effectively cultivate a generation of local entrepreneurs equipped for the digital age. Shoplazza will also do its part in the realization of this vision with its own technical and product capabilities, and work together with industry peers for the prosperous development of African e-commerce.