Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan (Part 1)

Andrew has built AfterShip by heavily leveraging the e-commerce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Marketplaces. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as AfterShip.

Andrew Chan: I’m one of the co-founders at AfterShip, which we started back in 2012. AfterShip handles the problem of shipment tracking experience for online retailers. We take care of the post-purchase experience of the online retailers of the shipment in the tracking area, helping marketplaces and brands provide a better experience for shipment tracking.

When a user buys something online, they receive a tracking number, but they have to jump to different websites to find out where the package is. We help connect the carriers and brands. We now have almost 300 people in over five offices in the world. Most of our clients are in the US. They are mostly e-commerce businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Andrew Chan: We are based in Hong Kong, but we’ve offices in the US, Europe, China, and India.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what systems you are plugging into.

Andrew Chan: We have two different types of customers. One is marketplaces. These are the eBay’s. They use our API to connect with their own system to send the tracking numbers to us. We can then analyze the shipment and send it back to them. The second are brands that are running on Shopify, Magento, or Salesforce. They’re looking for a more seamless integration experience. It can be a click on their Shopify store and they can connect to AfterShip.

Sramana Mitra: So you provide API’s to all of those platforms?

Andrew Chan: Right.

Sramana Mitra: How do you acquire customers? Are you selling in the Shopify marketplace?

Andrew Chan: We are on different app stores. Shopify is one key channel for sure. The other place is Magento. They have their marketplace. SEO is also one key channel. A year and a half ago, we didn’t have a sales and marketing team. It was more by word-of-mouth.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business comes from the marketplaces of Shopify and BigCommerce?

Andrew Chan: 50-50. Marketplaces are always more advanced in technology. Brands are getting more technical as well.

Sramana Mitra: When you started, you had no sales. You were pretty much acquiring customers through other channels. Could you talk about that?

Andrew Chan: One is that you really need to provide great service in marketplaces. We’ve got 24/7 support. Back in 2012, everyone was talking about social media. Now, e-commerce is a hot topic. We got a very niche position in marketplaces. That got people’s attention. Most of the SaaS solutions that time were very simple. We focused on operations. We also got funding back in 2014. We raised a million in the first round. Then we got the $66 million with Tiger Global. That landed us a few articles on Tech Crunch and helped us reach many enterprises. As a startup, it’s very hard to get into the enterprise.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: AfterShip CEO Andrew Chan
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