Social commerce is attracting significant investment from multinational companies, but growth alone cannot justify every investment. The real challenge is distinguishing strategic opportunity from economic value—and knowing how much investment the evidence can support.
Vietnam’s e-commerce market is still growing, but fewer sellers are capturing that growth. As value becomes more concentrated, brands need to rethink what deserves investment, protection, and scale.
The same livestream format can work very differently across platforms. TikTok Live and Shopee Live start from different consumer contexts, so the content needs a different job to move people toward purchase.
TikTok Shop changed where commerce begins by integrating discovery, content and transaction. Shopee is taking a different route — connecting its commerce infrastructure to more places where discovery happens.
Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shop each challenged Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market in different ways. Looking across their rise reveals a recurring pattern: the challengers that matter most are often the ones that build around changing consumer behaviour.
Marketplace growth can be hard to walk away from. The harder question is what the business is actually building that it will own beyond the transaction.