Synagie partners WeChat vendor to help SMEs tap China's social e-commerce market

E-COMMERCE solutions vendor Synagie on Monday said it has struck a deal with WeChat solutions provider Weimob to enter China's social e-commerce market, a subset of e-commerce usually conducted via social network services.

It also marks the first time the company is entering China, it confirmed to The Business Times.

As a result of the move, Synagie will create an end-to-end solution to help SMEs in Singapore and South-east Asia to break into China's social e-commerce market, as well as manage and scale their online cross-border businesses in South-east Asia and China.

It will tap Weimob's e-commerce solutions and domain expertise in China's e-commerce market, with its solution covering the entire commerce value-chain.

This ranges from setting up an SME's WeChat official account to digital store management, content translation, digital marketing and smart supply chain for fulfilling cross-border orders to consumers in China.

Synagie is targeting for the solution to go live by the third quarter of 2019.

Its new partner Weimob is a Hong Kong listed cloud-based commerce and marketing solutions provider, and the largest third-party service provider for SMEs in the WeChat ecosystem, Synagie said.

It also offers advertising solutions covering the entire Tencent ecosystem, Baidu and Zhihu - a question and answer platform.

Synagie chief executive and executive director Clement Lee said the company is looking at a "new partnership model" with customers where it would take a percentage of sales which were aided by Synagie.

"We believe this is the future of commerce and one that is well suited for SMEs as no upfront investment is required," he added.