Every incumbent was once a challenger.
Southeast Asia e-commerce has gone through several distinct waves. Today, it is easy to look at Southeast Asian ecommerce and put the labels in place. Shopee is the market leader. TikTok Shop is the challenger gaining ground. Lazada is the older player looking for its next position.
But those labels are only snapshots. Lazada was once the challenger too.
And looking at Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shop together reveals a pattern that I find more interesting than simply asking who is winning the market.
The strongest challengers do not always win by building a better version of what already exists. They find a way to build around what is changing.
Lazada was once a game changer too
When Lazada entered Southeast Asia, ecommerce was still in its early stages. The challenge was not simply to compete for existing online shoppers. The market itself was still being built.
Consumers were learning to shop online. Brands and merchants were learning how to sell online. Payments, logistics and marketplace infrastructure were developing alongside the demand.
Lazada helped establish ecommerce as a meaningful part of the region’s retail landscape.
In other words, Lazada was not just competing in an existing market. It was helping create one.
That matters when we look at what happened next. Because once a market becomes established, the opportunity for the next challenger changes too.
Then Shopee entered a different version of ecommerce
Shopee launched in Southeast Asia in 2015, after Lazada had already established itself across the region. It was entering a market that already had a marketplace model. But the consumer environment was changing. Smartphones were becoming a primary gateway to digital services, including commerce.
Shopee made a deliberate mobile-first choice. Its app launched across seven Southeast Asian markets before its websites, and by the first half of 2017, around 93% of its orders were placed through the mobile app. Mobile clearly mattered.
But I would be careful about reducing the Shopee story to: Mobile beat Lazada.
Shopee’s differentiation was broader, combining mobile, data-driven customer understanding, localisation, platform strategy and customer experience.
The more useful observation is that Shopee entered a market Lazada had helped create, then built around how consumers were beginning to use commerce differently. It did not need to reinvent ecommerce from scratch. It found a different way to make ecommerce work for the next stage of the consumer journey.
This is where the challenger pattern starts to appear
A challenger does not necessarily need to be better at everything. It can gain an advantage by being better aligned with something that is becoming more important.
The sequence is often less straightforward than:
Old platform → new platform → winner.
It looks more like:
- A market establishes a model.
- Consumer behaviour starts to shift.
- A challenger builds around that shift.
And, if the behaviour becomes important enough, the basis of competition starts to move.
The technology can be different. The business model can be different. The consumer behaviour can be different. What repeats is the logic:
A challenger finds leverage by building around a behavioural shift before that shift becomes central to the incumbent’s model.
That is what makes TikTok Shop interesting today.
TikTok Shop entered a much more mature market
TikTok Shop did not enter Southeast Asia when ecommerce was still being invented. It entered a market with established marketplaces, sellers, logistics, payments and shopping habits.
So it did not need to teach consumers what ecommerce was. It found another place for the shopping journey to begin.
TikTok did not start with commerce. It started with attention.
Short-form video, creators, recommendations and communities were already built around discovery. The starting point was different. A consumer could encounter a product through content before having a clearly defined shopping mission:
Content → Discovery → Interest → Consideration → Purchase
TikTok Shop connected commerce to that behaviour. That is different from simply building another marketplace. It built around a behaviour that traditional marketplaces were not originally designed to own. And that behaviour is becoming commercially significant.
TikTok reported strong growth across TikTok Shop in Vietnam in 2025, including GMV, buyers, sellers, affiliate creators and shopping-linked short-form video. At the regional level, content commerce also represented a growing share of platform ecommerce.
The important change is not simply that TikTok started selling products. It is that commerce became part of the discovery environment itself.
But discovery did not replace search. This is where the comparison can become too simplistic.
It would be easy to describe the evolution as: Search → Discovery
But I don’t think that is quite right.
TikTok’s own data shows search becoming increasingly important too. Consumers can move between content discovery, search, comparison and purchase within the same journey.
A consumer might:
Discover → Search → Compare → Buy
Or:
Search → Watch → Validate → Buy
So the disruption is not discovery replacing search. It is the two becoming increasingly connected.
And that distinction matters.
Because disruption does not always mean one behaviour disappears. Sometimes it means another behaviour becomes important enough to change how the journey works.
The pattern repeats. The behaviour doesn’t.
This is where the Lazada–Shopee–TikTok Shop comparison becomes useful — and where it needs to stop.
Lazada helped establish ecommerce as a meaningful consumer behaviour in Southeast Asia. Shopee built around the next stage of that behaviour, particularly the shift toward mobile-first commerce. TikTok Shop is building around another shift: the growing role of content, creators and discovery in how people encounter products.
But what happens when the incumbent has to respond to that shift? I explore that question in Shopee Isn’t Trying to Beat TikTok Shop. These are not the same strategies. And there is no reason to assume TikTok Shop will reproduce Shopee’s outcome.
The pattern repeats. The behaviour doesn’t. That is the part worth paying attention to.
Not the playbook. The logic behind it. What challengers really change
When we talk about disruption, we often look at the visible things:
- Price.
- Promotions.
- Traffic.
- Features.
But the more consequential change can happen around the product: the consumer journey.
A challenger can change:
- where discovery happens
- what creates purchase intent
- how consideration is shaped
- where the transaction happens
And once those things change, the basis of competition can change with them.
This is why I don’t think the most useful question is:
Is TikTok Shop becoming the next Shopee?
A more useful question is:
What part of ecommerce is TikTok Shop making more important than it was before?
Every challenger eventually faces the same question. There is another reason I like looking at these three platforms together.
Lazada was once the challenger. Then Shopee became the challenger. Now TikTok Shop is challenging the established order.
The position changes. The market changes. And eventually, today’s challenger may become tomorrow’s incumbent.
That makes the real strategic advantage less about owning one particular playbook and more about recognising when the behaviour that made your model successful is no longer the only behaviour shaping the market.
For businesses, that creates a harder question than simply tracking market share:
Which part of our existing model depends on consumers continuing to behave the way they used to?
Because by the time the market-share numbers make a behavioural shift obvious, the shift itself may already be well underway.
The challenger pattern is bigger than any one platform
Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shop are not three versions of the same story. They represent three different moments in the evolution of Southeast Asian ecommerce.
Lazada helped build the market. Shopee built around the next stage of consumer behaviour. TikTok Shop is building around another.
The challenger changes.
The behaviour changes.
The market changes with it.
And perhaps that is the real challenger pattern:
The challenger does not simply enter the market. It changes what the market competes on.
