Ecommerce in Asia: A Founder’s Map of China and ASEAN

Three companies control almost everything. In 2025, Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop together took 98.8% of platform ecommerce sales in Southeast Asia, according to Momentum Works. Before you think about marketing, pricing or product in Asia, sit with that number. You are not opening a store in a new region. You are renting space on someone else’s platform, on their terms, with their fees.

Asia is the largest ecommerce growth story on the planet, and the one most likely to burn an SME that treats it as a single market. This is a founder’s map: where the money is, who holds the gate, and what it costs to get in without planting an office you can’t afford.

“ASEAN” is six markets wearing one name

The headline number is real. Southeast Asia’s digital economy passed roughly $305 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, growing 15% year on year, with ecommerce alone around $185 billion (Google, Temasek & Bain, e-Conomy SEA 2025). That growth is the reason every deck about Asia looks exciting.

The trap is averaging it. In 2025 Indonesia was still the biggest market at 37% of regional GMV, but it grew only 2.2%. Thailand grew 51.8% and Malaysia 47.6% over the same year (Momentum Works). A plan built on “ASEAN is growing 15%” will overspend in the market that’s flat and underspend in the ones that are running. The region rewards founders who pick a beachhead market, win it, then port the playbook — not those who launch in six countries at once because the total looks big.

You don’t sell in Asia. You sell on a platform.

In the West, an SME can build a direct-to-consumer site and own the customer. In Southeast Asia, the platform owns the customer and you pay to reach them. Shopee held about 53% of regional GMV in 2025 and the number-one position in all six core markets. TikTok Shop, combined with Tokopedia, more than doubled its volume to reach roughly two-thirds of Shopee’s size (Momentum Works).

That concentration sets your economics before you’ve sold a unit. Commission, fulfilment fees, ad spend to surface in a crowded feed, and mandatory promotions all come out of a margin you set elsewhere. Video and live commerce now drive around 25% of regional ecommerce GMV, which means the work isn’t just listing a product — it’s producing a stream of content the platform’s algorithm will actually push. Budget for that, or stay invisible.

China is a different machine, not a bigger ASEAN

China rewards a separate strategy. For most foreign SMEs the realistic route in is cross-border — selling to Chinese consumers through bonded-warehouse and cross-border channels rather than a full local entity. The flow is enormous: China’s cross-border ecommerce trade reached about 2.06 trillion yuan in the first three quarters of 2025, up 6.4% year on year (China Customs, via People’s Daily).

The flip side is that China is also the world’s most demanding content and logistics environment. Livestream selling, marketplace-specific storefronts (Tmall Global, JD Worldwide), local payment rails and local-language customer service aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the cost of entry. An SME that wins in ASEAN with a lean team will need a heavier, more specialised setup to do the same in China.

Payments and logistics are local, every time

The quiet killer of Asia launches is assuming your home checkout and courier will travel. They won’t. Over 60% of payments in Southeast Asia are now digital, routed through national QR systems and local e-wallets rather than the cards your Western stack defaults to (e-Conomy SEA 2025). If a shopper in Manila or Jakarta can’t pay the way they always pay, they leave.

Logistics is the same story in reverse: fragmented last-mile networks, island geographies, customs that differ by country. This is exactly the kind of work that suits a distributed setup with regional partners — local payment integration handled by people who use those wallets daily, fulfilment routed through partners already operating in-country, rather than a head-office attempt to run it all remotely.

How to choose your first Asian market

Before committing budget, answer these with data, not enthusiasm:

• Where is demand actually growing? Match your category to the fast markets (Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam), not just the biggest one.
• Which platform owns your category there? Plan around Shopee or TikTok Shop economics specifically, including their fee and content demands.
• Can you produce video and live content weekly? If not, factor in a content partner — a quarter of GMV runs through it.
• Is your payment and fulfilment path local? No local wallet support, no local courier, no launch.
• What’s your realistic margin after platform take? Model it post-commission, post-promo, post-ad spend — then decide.

The honest trade-off

Asia’s growth is genuine, and so is its cost of admission. You trade the control of a DTC model for access to platforms that already own the demand. You take on content production at a cadence most SMEs underestimate. And you accept that “Asia” is a portfolio of distinct markets, each needing its own payment, logistics and language work.

The borderless model fits this well, because the work is naturally distributed — but it isn’t free of friction. Coordinating in-country partners across time zones takes discipline, and the cheapest local partner is not always the one who protects your margin. Name those costs up front. The founders who lose in Asia are usually the ones who treated platform fees and localisation as details rather than the business model.

Bottom line

Pick one market, win it on the platform that owns your category, pay in the wallets people actually use, and produce the content the algorithm rewards. Don’t average the region, and don’t plant an entity before a single market has earned it. Asia pays out for the founder who enters narrow and deep, not wide and hopeful.

If you’re weighing an Asian market and want a straight read on which one and what it really costs, that’s what our free audit is for.

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About the author: Daniele Antoniani is the founder of The Sharing Lab, a borderless studio that gives SMEs access to world-class global talent without agency markups or office overhead. He spent 15 years building affiliate programs and e-commerce partnerships across Europe and North America before founding the Lab.