Two platforms, two different jobs
Shopee and TikTok Shop are not competing for the same job in a media plan, and treating them as one interchangeable line item is where the budget math breaks. The regional numbers back up why: Shopee held 52% of Southeast Asia’s platform ecommerce GMV in 2024, per Momentum Works, while the top three platforms together, Shopee, TikTok Shop, and Lazada, controlled 84% of the region’s GMV that same year, up from 79% the year before. Meanwhile TikTok Shop’s own regional GMV doubled year-on-year to US$45.6 billion in 2025. Both things are true simultaneously: Shopee still commands the larger base, and TikTok Shop is growing off a smaller base at a materially faster rate.
Shopee captures intent that already exists
Shopee’s position is a search-and-browse marketplace. A shopper searching a category or scrolling a flash sale page has already decided to buy something close to the product on offer. Shopee’s job in that moment is to be found and to convert, which is why category share and search visibility are the metrics that move Shopee performance, not content output.
That defensive strength is exactly what the 2024 concentration numbers describe. A platform holding 52% of regional GMV, inside a top-three group holding 84%, is not a channel a seller can treat as optional. It is the base layer most SEA catalogs still sell against, regardless of how fast a competing channel is growing elsewhere.
TikTok Shop creates intent that did not exist minutes earlier
TikTok Shop’s growth trajectory, GMV doubling to US$45.6 billion in 2025 on top of an already large prior-year base, reflects a fundamentally different mechanism. Content, a host, or a creator moves a viewer from passively scrolling to actively buying inside a single session, often for a product the viewer had no prior intent to search for. That is a demand-generation channel wearing a commerce interface, not a search-and-browse marketplace with video attached.
The doubling in 2025 did not happen because search behavior shifted toward TikTok. It happened because the content and livestream layer got better at converting attention that was never commerce-intent in the first place. Budget that fuels that mechanism, creator fees, livestream production, content volume, is doing a different job than budget spent defending a Shopee search position, even when both line items sit in the same monthly media plan.
Why funding both at the same ratio misreads the numbers
Funding Shopee and TikTok Shop at a fixed ratio, say a static 60/40 split carried over from a prior quarter, ignores that the two platforms respond to entirely different inputs. Shopee spend should scale with the category’s actual search volume and the seller’s current share within it, since more budget on a channel with flat or shrinking category search volume does not create more intent to capture. TikTok Shop spend should scale with content velocity and creator output, since starving the content engine on a demand-generation channel starves the entire channel’s ability to convert, not just the specific campaign the budget was allocated to.
A seller who cuts TikTok Shop content spend expecting only that campaign’s results to soften is misreading the mechanism. Content-driven channels compound: a thin content calendar this month reduces the audience and algorithmic reach available next month too, in a way that a search-and-browse channel like Shopee, with more stable underlying demand, does not.
Fund Shopee against search volume and category share. Fund TikTok Shop against content velocity and creator output. The two platforms answer to different inputs, and a single ratio applied to both is a guess dressed up as a plan.
Research Ledger (5 claims)
| Entity | Claim | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopee | Held 52% of Southeast Asia’s regional platform ecommerce GMV in 2024 | Momentum Works, “Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2025” report, cited via The Low Down (Momentum Works’ own publication), 26 June 2025 | VERIFIED |
| Shopee, TikTok Shop, Lazada | Top three regional platforms held a combined 84% of Southeast Asia platform GMV in 2024, up from 79% in 2023 | Momentum Works, same report | VERIFIED |
| Southeast Asia platform ecommerce | Total regional platform GMV reached US$157.6 billion in 2025 | Momentum Works, “Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2026” report, published April 2026 | VERIFIED |
| TikTok Shop | Southeast Asia GMV doubled year-on-year to US$45.6 billion in 2025 | Momentum Works data, reported by TechNode Global, 11 February 2026 | VERIFIED |
| TikTok Shop | Grew roughly tenfold in Southeast Asia GMV over three years (from an approximately US$4.4 billion base) | Momentum Works GMV Tracker, cited by DigitalinAsia, 12 May 2026; the underlying multi-year figures are not independently confirmed in the citing article | INFERRED |