Southeast Asia’s content commerce gross merchandise value (GMV) is on track to reach $77.9 billion in 2026, as live, short video and content-focused affiliates become a core part of the region’s ecommerce mix, according to Momentum Works’ latest report, Live Commerce in Southeast Asia 2026.
Combined content commerce GMV across Shopee, TikTok Shop and Lazada reached $49.7 billion in 2025, up 98 percent year-on-year, Momentum Works said in a statement on Tuesday.
It estimates $33.8 billion was transacted in the first half of 2026 alone. At the current trajectory, the full year is on track for $77.9 billion.
It is noted that in the first half of 2026, content commerce accounted for 37 percent of Southeast Asia’s platform ecommerce GMV, up from just 20 percent in 2024.
Live commerce, in particular, has moved from an experimental channel to a regular part of the ecommerce mix for many brands and sellers.
But Momentum Works expects the unusually attractive returns available in live today to become harder to sustain as more brands, sellers and creators develop the same capabilities.
According to the report, live commerce has moved from experiment to infrastructure. For many brands, the question is no longer whether to be in live, but what role it should play and how much operational capability to build around it.
Current live return of investment (ROI) has been satisfactory, but the role live plays – and the returns it delivers – vary widely by category, product and content quality, said the report.
The report also showed that live’s attractive ROI is on borrowed time; the durable model is brandformance.
According to the report, current live commerce returns are supported by growing consumer attention, platform support and competition that has yet to fully mature.
As more brands and sellers enter the channel, those returns are likely to normalize. The longer-term challenge is therefore not simply running live efficiently, but integrating brand building and conversion — often described as “brandformance”.
As execution becomes easier to replicate, operational capability alone becomes less of a differentiator, said the report.
It is noted that artificial intelligence (AI) live has a structural cost advantage. In selected cases, it costs around 20 percent to 25 percent of a comparable human operation while achieving around 80 percent of human livestream GMV per hour on average.
Capabilities that once took brands, agencies and operators years to develop are becoming accessible through technology and platform tools. This raises a more important question for brands: what do they still own when competitors have access to the same operating capabilities?
The report also highlighted that live is an entry point into content commerce, not the whole strategy.
Live is the easiest format to commit to – its output is visible and its conversion immediately trackable – which is exactly why brands may over-invest in it and under-fund the short video, affiliate and review content that often creates the demand in the first place, said Momentum Works.
But a single purchase rarely runs through a single channel, and winning content commerce means working across different formats as a portfolio rather than in isolation. As competition intensifies and one-off conversion grows more expensive, running live well is no longer enough to stay ahead.
The report also showed China remains the most developed live commerce ecosystem and offers lessons in automation, AI adoption and data-driven operations.
But its playbook cannot simply be transplanted into Southeast Asia. Local creator dynamics, consumer behavior and channel economics still require brands to adapt the model market by market.
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