Shopee, Lazada, or TikTok Shop: which Southeast Asia marketplace to launch on first
Short version: if you sell impulse-friendly, demo-able, mass-price goods and you can produce video, launch on TikTok Shop first — that's where the growth and the cheapest attention are right now. If you sell considered or premium products where people search before they buy, start on Shopee, because intent and reach still live there and it leads every market in the region. Lazada is rarely the right first move in 2026 unless you're chasing a specific segment it still over-indexes on. Pick by how your buyer decides, not by which logo is biggest.
People ask me this in the wrong order. They start with "which platform is biggest?" and want a single answer for all of Southeast Asia. But Southeast Asia isn't one market — it's six wildly different ones stapled together by a map, and the marketplace question only makes sense once you've named the country and the category. The good news is the field has finally narrowed enough to reason about. The bad news is most brands still pick the platform first and figure out the buyer later, which is exactly backwards.
The market is now three players, and that's it
For years the answer was complicated by a long tail of regional and local marketplaces. That tail is mostly gone. In 2025, platform e-commerce across the six major Southeast Asian markets reached roughly US$157.6 billion, growing around 23% year on year, according to Momentum Works' annual report — and Shopee, TikTok Shop (including Tokopedia), and Lazada together accounted for about 98.8% of it. When three players own essentially the whole board, "which one first" is a real strategic question, not a coin flip among a dozen.
Here's roughly where the three sat at the end of 2025. Treat the numbers as directional — different firms count GMV differently — but the shape is consistent across sources:
| Platform | ~2025 share of the big-3 GMV | Trajectory | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopee | ~53% | Still #1 in all six markets; steady | Search-led, considered, and premium goods; brands that want reach + intent |
| TikTok Shop (+Tokopedia) | ~31% (up from ~23%) | Fastest-growing; SEA GMV roughly doubled to ~US$45.6B | Impulse, demo-able, video-friendly, mass-price products |
| Lazada | ~9% (down from ~16%) | Declining; ceding share to the other two | Narrowing — specific segments and markets where it still over-indexes |
The headline most people take away is "TikTok Shop is eating everyone." It's the growth story, yes — but Shopee still moves more goods than the other two combined and leads every single country. The right read isn't "pick the winner." It's "pick the platform whose buying behavior matches how your product gets bought."
Pick by how your product gets bought, not by GMV
The two big platforms aren't the same shape of demand. Shopee is a search-and-browse marketplace: someone wants a thing, types it in, compares, buys. That's intent you can capture. TikTok Shop is discovery commerce: nobody woke up wanting your product, they were scrolling, a video caught them, they bought on impulse. That's demand you have to create — and it only works if the thing demos well in fifteen seconds.
So the honest first question isn't "which is bigger," it's "does my product get searched for, or does it get discovered?" A replacement water filter cartridge gets searched for — put it where search lives. A colour-changing lip oil gets discovered — put it where the feed lives. Get that right and the platform picks itself.
- Lead with TikTok Shop if your product is visual, demonstrable, impulse-priced, and you can reliably produce (or commission) short video. Beauty, fashion, gadgets, snacks, novelty home — the stuff that's fun to watch someone use.
- Lead with Shopee if your product is considered, compared, or premium, if buyers research before purchase, or if your margins can't survive an impulse-discount culture. Also the safer first store if you can't feed the content machine.
- Consider Lazada only as a fast-follow second store, or first only for specific premium/electronics plays in markets where it retains a loyal base — not as your beachhead.
Then pick the country, because "Southeast Asia" is a fiction
There is no regional launch. There are country launches that happen to share a region. The platform mix, the logistics, the price sensitivity, and the growth rate all change when you cross a border.
Indonesia is the giant — the largest e-commerce market in the region, somewhere around a third of total GMV — but its growth cooled hard in 2025 (low single digits), so it's a scale play, not a momentum play. It's also where TikTok Shop is unusually strong because of the Tokopedia integration, which gives it local logistics and trust that took everyone else years to build. The fastest growth in 2025 was elsewhere: Thailand and Malaysia both grew north of 45%. If you want a market that's expanding under your feet rather than one you have to claw share in, those two deserve a serious look before Indonesia.
The practical move: choose one or two countries to win, not "the region" to dabble in. A focused launch in Thailand that nails content and fulfilment beats a thin six-country rollout that nobody owns. This is the same discipline I argue for in deciding China or Southeast Asia first — concentration beats breadth when you're still learning the market.
Don't let the headline fee fool you
Brands love comparing commission rates and then get ambushed by the real take rate. The advertised numbers look manageable — TikTok Shop's all-in fees often land somewhere around 6–10% of an order, Shopee's commissions plus its payment and technical-support fees run higher, and Lazada higher still — but those are the floor, not the cost. Once you add the discounts the platform pressures you into, the ad spend you need to be visible, free-shipping co-funding, and affiliate or creator commissions, the effective take on a discounted sale can climb toward 20–25%. (Shopee also rolled a new ~5% technical-support fee into several markets in early 2026, which is the kind of mid-game change you have to price in.)
Two implications. First, model your unit economics on the all-in take rate, not the headline commission, before you pick — a platform that's "cheaper" on paper can be more expensive after you buy the visibility it takes to sell there. Second, build in margin for the platform to change the rules, because it will. The cheapest channel to acquire on is rarely the cheapest channel to keep selling on once the introductory incentives lapse.
What "launch first" should actually mean
Launching on a marketplace isn't flipping a store live. It's committing to feed it. TikTok Shop without a steady content engine — your own videos plus a creator/affiliate program — is a dead storefront, because the platform gives you nothing for free without the feed. Shopee without keyword and campaign discipline is a listing nobody finds. So "which first" is also a question about what your team can actually sustain. If you can produce video weekly, TikTok Shop rewards it faster than anything else in the region right now. If you can't, don't launch there to look modern — you'll just have a tidy empty shop.
Bottom line
Southeast Asia is a three-platform market, and the first-launch decision is mostly settled by two questions: does my product get searched for or discovered, and which one or two countries am I actually going to win? Discovery-led, video-friendly, impulse-priced goods belong on TikTok Shop first; searched-for, considered, or premium goods belong on Shopee first; Lazada is a fast-follow, not a beachhead. Model the all-in take rate, not the headline fee, and pick countries instead of "the region." The brands that lose here are the ones that picked the biggest logo and hoped the buyer would adapt.
If you're weighing a Southeast Asia launch and want a second read on the platform-and-country call before you commit budget, that's the work I do — reach out. And if you're also looking north, here's how I'd think about which market to enter first.