"HKUST professors made me examine things from different perspectives. It is important to always embrace challenges and keep being inspired," said Tony Wong, Co-founder and CEO of SHOPLINE, now Asia's biggest smart e-commerce platform through which more than 350,000 merchants starting their online businesses.

Growing up in Venezuela and has lived across the world, Tony has been having a passion for solving the problems small and mid-sized enterprises face in digitalizing their business. Tony met his Co-founder sharing the same passion after he graduated from HKUST with MSc in Information Systems Management.

Together they launched SHOPLINE which provides crucial elements such as centralized inventory, social e-commerce operation, and order management system with their drag-and-drop design tools and consultancy. The platform also offer scrucial data on customer purchases and behavior which is gold to these SMEs.

When talking about SHOPLINE, it turns out it is Tony's second attempt at building his start-up. With the experience of the first failure, Tony realizes business model and interaction with both sides of the business, customer and merchants are critical success factors and therefore has to devote more efforts to these aspects. Such an emphasis pays off: SHOPLINE not only rises from a 3-person team to over 2000 staff members with teams over 10 cities in Asia, but has also recorded a double-digit growth year-on-year in merchant count and gross merchandise value in 2021 under the pandemic.

Being proud graduate of HKUST, Tony is thankful for having his horizons expanded from a technical coding background through this master's program. "I remember learning about topics like intellectual property with Professor Ted Clark that made me examine things from different perspectives and equipped me with the knowledge and skills to build products." Tony said.

Know more about Tony's story from Alumni Newsletter Summer 2022