When I took on the Vietnam digital commerce business was still at an early stage on the major e-commerce platforms. The experience became a lesson in building e-commerce platform partnerships before the business was large enough to command them.
The challenge was not simply to grow platform sales. It was to build enough credibility and commercial relevance for the business to become a meaningful partner to the platforms.
So the first priority was not asking for more support. It was building the conditions for that support to become possible.
Earn the seat
The first step was establishing a direct brand presence with the platforms while strengthening the fundamentals behind the business. I worked across commercial, operations and media to build a stronger foundation, while developing direct relationships with the platform teams.
The objective was not simply better store performance. It was to create enough credibility to have a more strategic business conversation. Before asking for leverage, build something the other side has a reason to invest in.
Find leverage beyond current scale
As the business started engaging more strategically with the platforms, scale remained a natural constraint. Rather than treating that constraint as a fixed ceiling, I looked for other sources of leverage — including broader stakeholder relationships and the wider business context around the account. That helped move the conversation from:
“Are we large enough?”
to:
“What could this partnership become?”
For me, that was an important shift in how I approached platform relationships. When you cannot immediately change the scale of the business, you can sometimes change the context in which the business is evaluated.
Shape the partnership, not just the terms
Once a strategic partnership was possible, the next challenge was making it commercially sustainable. Platform expectations do not always map neatly onto the economics or maturity of a business.
I learned to treat those moments not as a choice between accepting or rejecting a requirement, but as a value-exchange problem: What does the platform need? What can the business sustainably deliver? And where can both sides create more value by structuring the partnership differently?
That approach allowed me to negotiate for a model that was more proportionate to the business while still addressing the platform’s objectives.
Adapt the model as the business evolves
When the business later entered a new platform at a much earlier stage, I did not try to replicate the same partnership model. Instead, I worked with the platform around the business’s maturity, ambition and investment capacity.
The initial partnership structure gave both sides room to build confidence and prove potential before deepening the relationship. As the business grew, the platform relationship evolved with it. A similar evolution happened with Lazada, where an additional commercial model was developed alongside the existing marketplace business.
The important part was not the individual platform mechanisms. It was the ability to adapt the partnership architecture as the business and the relationship matured.
What I took from the experience
I used to think about platform partnerships mainly as a route to access: visibility → traffic → sales.
Over time, I started seeing them differently. A strong platform relationship can become a form of commercial leverage. But that leverage is rarely available at the beginning. It is built through credibility, mutual value, stakeholder influence and the judgement to know when to execute — and when to reshape the conversation.
Strategic partnerships are built, not given.
