Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market is often talked about in terms of scale and growth. According to the DBS Nextwave SEA 2025 Report, e-commerce GMV across the region is projected to reach US$185 billion in 2025, rising to US$410 billion by 2030. For the regional teams sitting in Singapore, KL or Bangkok, managing brand P&Ls across Southeast Asia, that growth story is indeed a real opportunity. However, what is less often discussed is the operational complexity that comes with pursuing it.
The fundamentals have largely been solved. Consumers are online. Payments work. Logistics have matured, although requirements keep getting stricter. Marketplaces are well established. What hasn’t caught up is how most businesses are structured to operate across a region that has many commonalities across markets, yet refuses to behave like. Six markets and six different games.
Southeast Asia is not a single market
Some brands treat Southeast Asia as a single market with a regional strategy layered on top. It isn’t. Even though consumers shop on the same platforms across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, each market is distinctly different.
Take Indonesia and Vietnam. Both are high-growth, mobile-first markets, where TikTok, Shopee and Lazada hold similar positions. Yet live commerce and the creator economy have evolved differently in both markets. Vietnam moved faster than almost anywhere else in the region — consumers expect real-time product demonstration, social proof from influencers they follow, and frictionless in-stream purchase. Mega influencers are much more influential in Vietnam vs Indonesia; the regulatory landscape is evolving differently with different challenges in both markets, and consumers in Vietnam have much higher expectations on delivery speed than in Indonesia. A campaign strategy built for one does not travel cleanly to the other, even when the brief looks identical on paper.
The brands that win across markets aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with on-the-ground teams and partners who understand what triggers purchase behaviour in each specific context — and who can act on that without requiring HQ sign-off.
The consumer journey stopped being linear a while ago
What’s changed most sharply in the past two years isn’t platform growth — it’s the shape of how people actually buy things.
According to the 2025 e-Conomy SEA report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, video commerce now accounts for 25 percent of total e-commerce GMV across the region, having surged five-fold in just three years. Affiliates drive the majority of TikTok GMV for many brands. That is a structural shift in how commerce works here.
The old model assumed a reasonably straight path: awareness, consideration, conversion. You could allocate a budget across that funnel and measure each stage with some confidence.
That model doesn’t describe SEA consumer behavior anymore. A shopper in Ho Chi Minh City might discover a brand through a TikTok creator, see a retargeted ad on Meta at lunch the next day, check different products, prices and reviews on Shopee, and make a purchase that evening. Different channels are fulfilling different roles, and brands are responding by differentiating assortment by channel: more entry-friendly price points and pack sizes on TikTok Shop, broader catalogue depth on marketplaces, and new launches or exclusives reserved for brand.com. Channel is no longer just a distribution choice. It’s becoming a deliberate part of how brands bring the 4P’s of marketing to life in SEA’s omni-channel online landscape.
The implication for brands is that each channel is no longer doing its own contained job. Content on TikTok influences conversion on Shopee. A poorly handled customer service interaction on a marketplace affects brand equity on Meta. The channels are interconnected, but most operating models still treat them as separate line items in a media plan or PnL.
Fragmentation kills efficiency
There’s a version of regional presence that looks impressive on a slide but is quietly falling apart operationally. I’ve seen it enough times to recognize the pattern. A brand operates across SEA markets with separate agencies or internal teams managing each market, or with different agencies per channel. Performance data lives in different dashboards. Regional marketing and local commercial teams are optimizing for different KPIs. Nobody at the regional level has a clear view of what’s actually driving results, and cross-market learning — the kind that should compound over time — never happens because there’s no common infrastructure to capture it.
This is the underrated cost of fragmented execution. It shows up as slow campaign adaptation, duplicated effort across markets, and missed windows because no one connected the dots to replicate what was working in Thailand for the next campaign in Malaysia as well.
The brands building real regional advantage right now are investing in unified visibility — shared dashboards, standardized workflows, consistent measurement frameworks across markets while leaving the necessary room for local adaptation. Not because those things are exciting, but because without them, growth just generates more noise.
The next advantage is operational, not just commercial
The first phase of e-commerce in Southeast Asia was largely about presence. Get onto the platforms, establish the brand, capture early-mover ground. Most serious players have done that now. The differentiation in the next phase will come from how well brands can execute consistently while staying responsive to market conditions that change quickly and don’t always give advance notice.
Omnichannel e-commerce in SEA used to be two marketplaces, two versions of the same model. Today there’s TikTok. Tomorrow, due to increasing platform commissions, many brands are considering stepping up their brand.com game.
A shift in platform algorithms, new ad types, or changes in platform fees can render your marketing and commercial plans unsustainable in weeks. Consumer expectations in Vietnam today look different from twelve months ago, and they’ll look different again twelve months from now. The brands with durable competitive positions will be those whose operating model is designed with the agility to mitigate those changes.
That requires genuine on-the-ground capability, not just a regional hub managing markets at arm’s length. The real advantage comes from teams embedded in local markets who understand the nuances, have direct platform relationships, and can turn what they’re seeing into action without layers of delay. The challenge is making sure these insights shape decisions beyond a single market, rather than staying siloed in individual market reports that nobody reads across borders.
Tomorrow requires capabilities brands didn’t need yesterday
Southeast Asia’s e-commerce opportunity is real, and it’s large. But the brands that capture it won’t necessarily be the ones with the largest marketing budgets. They’ll be the ones that have figured out an integrated strategy and operations across fragmented platforms, increasingly complex consumer journeys, and markets that each demand genuine local understanding.
The first phase of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce story rewarded scale and speed. The next phase will reward something harder to replicate: the ability to hold it all together, across channels and markets, while remaining agile and localized. Therefore, the harder question for any brand in this region isn’t where to invest — it’s how to ensure your go-to-market strategy and operations are set up to continue to succeed twelve months from now.
Jasper Knoben is Group CEO of Intrepid, a leading e-commerce and digital solutions provider in Southeast Asia. Since 2019, he has led the company’s growth from early days startup to being recognized as one of the industry leaders, and as the trusted partner for its ever-expanding roster of global brands with a clear strategic vision, focusing on E2E omni-channel services, technology leadership, a fantastic culture and team.
A recognized voice in Southeast Asia’s e-commerce landscape, Jasper frequently speaks on navigating the region’s fragmented digital commerce environment, including AI, automation, and the rise of TikTok-driven “shoppertainment.”
Prior to becoming CEO, Jasper served as Chief Commercial Officer at Intrepid, where he played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s commercial strategy. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Philips, where he built and scaled e-commerce operations across ASEAN, served as the first Head of Marketplace at Lazada Vietnam, and held roles in strategy consulting at Accenture.
Jasper holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MSc in Marine Engineering from Delft University of Technology.
Outside of work, he is a keen sailor and (trail)runner, loves traveling and spending time with his wife and 2 kids.
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