ShopX — the global ecommerce event in Hanoi, hosted by Gem

Around 9 PM on April 17, 2025, I noticed something I didn’t expect.

The official program at Mövenpick Living West Hanoi had ended hours ago. The sponsors had packed up their backdrops. The hotel staff were giving us polite, please-go-home smiles. And yet, the room hadn’t emptied.

Brand operators from Saigon were sketching landing-page wireframes on hotel napkins for a Singapore agency owner. A Sydney-based DTC coach was deep in a 1:1 with a kuajing seller from Shenzhen, talking through cross-border payment rails. A founder I’d known for years was meeting a sourcing partner he’d somehow never been introduced to — even though their offices are forty minutes apart in District 1.

That was the moment I knew ShopX 2025 had worked.

This essay is the recap I owe everyone who showed up — and the announcement of what comes next.

The room

ShopX 2025 — officially Future of Ecommerce Experience: CRO Day 2025 — was co-hosted by GemPages and PushOwl on Thursday, April 17, 2025 at Mövenpick Living West Hanoi.

The numbers, for the record:

50+ Shopify Plus brand operators from across APAC.
100+ partners, agencies, and app builders — silver, gold, and title sponsors stacked along the wall.
20+ keynote speakers from Vietnam, China, Singapore, Australia, India, and the Philippines.
5 panel discussions — from CRO and A/B testing through bundling, post-purchase, retention, fund raising, and ecosystem-led growth.
One honest-to-god Pickleball Championship, because we couldn’t think of a better way to put a CRO expert and a Shopify agency founder on the same court for forty-five minutes.

It was, to my knowledge, the first global-scale ecommerce-enabler gathering hosted in Vietnam — not a local meetup with foreign guest stars, not a chapter of someone else’s conference, but a room curated end-to-end from Hanoi.

The agenda was almost beside the point

Don’t get me wrong — the agenda was good.

Steve Erl walked through advertorial archetypes that the team behind GemStory has now analyzed across 2,620+ winning ad pages. Joshua Chin from Chronos Agency unpacked retention math that had half the room re-running their own LTV formulas in a Google Sheet under the table. Arjun Vaidya from V3 Ventures took the question every founder in the room was scared to ask out loud — how do you actually raise for an ecommerce brand in 2025? — and answered it without the usual VC platitudes. Vargab Bakshi shared what he learned running APAC for Shopify and Wix. Steve Miguel and Stef CROWizard stress-tested funnel optimization the way only operators who’ve actually shipped can.

But here’s what surprised me, watching from the side of the stage: the agenda wasn’t the product. The agenda was the excuse.

The product was the corridor between sessions. The product was the lunch table where a Vietnam-based copywriter sat down next to a US-based brand owner and walked away with a six-month contract. The product was the moment, somewhere around panel three, when an attendee leaned over and said “I came for the CRO talks, but the real value is — everyone in this room is one introduction away.”

That’s the line I haven’t been able to shake.

Why Vietnam, why now

There’s a story global ecommerce hasn’t quite caught up to yet, and ShopX 2025 felt like the room finally noticing it.

Two stats from the event deck:

Half of all $1M+ Shopify dropshippers operate from this region.

Four of the five most-installed apps on the Shopify App Store were built in Vietnam.

That’s not a country aspiring to be on the map. That’s a country that’s already on the map and just hasn’t gotten a name on the badge yet.

For ten years, we’ve bootstrapped GemPages from Saigon to 100,000+ Shopify merchants. The whole time, the merchants we serve assumed they were buying from somewhere familiar — Toronto, San Francisco, Tel Aviv. Fewer than one in ten knew GemPages was Vietnamese.

ShopX was, for me, the first time the picture flipped. The international guests didn’t show up to “discover Vietnam.” They showed up because the operators they wanted to learn from were already here.

What the testimonials told us

In the days after the event, the comments started coming in. I want to share one in particular, from Goldi Kambale, a Shopify CRO expert who flew in from India as a VIP guest:

“A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending ShopX in Hanoi as a VIP guest — and what an incredible few days it was. Massive shoutout to the amazing teams at GemPages and PushOwl for organizing such a well-curated CRO-focused event. The best part was connecting with some of the sharpest minds in CRO, Shopify, and growth.”

Goldi was generous in framing — but the part that mattered to me was “connecting with some of the sharpest minds.” That wasn’t a line about content. That was a line about the room.

We got dozens of those — across X, LinkedIn, post-event surveys, voice notes in WhatsApp threads. The single comment that came back most often, in three languages, was a variation of: when’s the next one?

From event to community

Here’s where this essay turns from recap into announcement.

When you watch a one-day conference create six months of follow-on conversations, two cross-border partnerships, and a Shenzhen-Saigon-Sydney WhatsApp thread that’s still active four weeks later — you stop thinking of it as an event. You start thinking of it as a community that briefly took the shape of an event.

So that’s what we’re doing in 2026.

ShopX is becoming a non-profit APAC ecommerce-enabler community — year-round, multi-tier, multi-city. The mission is plain: be the first place an APAC seller turns to when they want to scale, go global, or find a partner. And the first door a global brand knocks on when they want into APAC.

Three things will be true about this community on day one:

1. It runs across four cities — the 4S Strategy: Shenzhen · Saigon · Singapore · Sydney. Shenzhen is where products are made. Saigon is where they’re operated and built. Singapore is where they’re funded and bridged. Sydney is where they’re sold to a mature DTC market. The 4S spine covers the full ecommerce value chain in one community.

2. It’s bi-weekly, not annual. We’re targeting 26+ events in 2026 — a mix of small Xiawucha coffee chats, masterminds, dinners, river cruises, trekking retreats, and one big flagship at year-end (the next ShopX, December 2026). The flagship is the climax. The community is the year-long thing that makes the flagship matter.

3. It’s non-profit. No founder. No owner. GemPages anchors operationally. The Most Active Nodes — operators, agencies, app builders, coaches — steward direction. Designed to outlast any individual, including me.

The thesis underneath all of it is a sentence from the internal community doc that I keep coming back to:

In an era where AI is automating everything, the people you build with become the scarcest asset.

I believe that more every month. AI can write your copy, generate your ads, run your A/B tests, and price your products. What it can’t do is sit across a hotel napkin from a stranger at 9 PM in Hanoi and turn that hour into a five-year working relationship.

ShopX is the room where that compounds.

What I want next

I want more of these. More than once a year. More than in one city.

I want a Shenzhen kuajing seller and a Sydney DTC coach to get on the same call because they bumped into each other in a Saigon coffee shop the month before. I want every $1M-ARR founder quietly running a brand out of this region to have a place to compare scar tissue with three others doing the same thing. I want the Vietnamese app builders running 4 of the top 5 Shopify installs to have a stage that’s actually theirs.

If you were in the room on April 17 — thank you. The recap doesn’t capture it. We both know.

If you weren’t — there’s a 2026 calendar coming. I’ll write about each event as it happens, here on this site, alongside everything else I’m trying to figure out about AI, CRO, and the next ten years of ecommerce.

Vietnam can be the Ecommerce Nation. ShopX is one of the rooms where we’re going to build it.

Together.