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Most regional brands categorise Shopee and Lazada as &#8220;sales channels,&#8221; where commercial teams own the relationship and marketing owns the brand. Consequently, marketplace budgets often sit outside the formal media plan.
This structural oversight is becoming expensive, as Sea Limited&#8217;s recent results demonstrate.
In Q2 2026, <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260810021050/en/Sea-Limited-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Results" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Shopee&#8217;s GMV grew 28% YoY to $38.3 billion</a>. Meanwhile, <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/se-q2-earnings-call-keeps-140000790.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">its advertising revenue surged over 70%</a>, with the ad take rate rising over 90 basis points. Sellers are not selling twice as much; they are paying twice as much, and twice as fast, just to maintain visibility.
Shopee is now a media company running a marketplace. It is repricing your shelf space while your media plan looks elsewhere.
<h2>What Is Retail Media, and Why Does It Matter in Southeast Asia?</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-761" src="https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1-300x167.jpg" alt="" width="700" height="390" srcset="https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1-300x167.jpg 300w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1-1024x572.jpg 1024w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1-768x429.jpg 768w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1-1536x857.jpg 1536w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img1.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/933230354045688964/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pinterest</a>
Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer on its own platform, powered by first-party purchase data. In Southeast Asia, this primarily involves Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and Grab Ads. These platforms have shifted from providing access to charging for visibility that was previously organic.
<h2>Key Takeaways</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Shopee&#8217;s Q2 2026 ad revenue grew over 70% against 28% GMV growth. Monetisation is outstripping actual commerce growth.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Organic reach is being restricted. Shopee made GMV Max the default in 2025, phasing out manual keyword campaigns.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Three platforms dominate. Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop held 99% of regional platform GMV in 2025.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">TikTok Shop is a major player. Its GMV reached 34.7 billion in H1 2026, up around 80% year-on-year.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Platform costs exceed ad spend. Commission, transaction, and technical fees often bring total costs above 20% of revenue.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">This is a media planning issue. Strategic retail media decisions should be integrated into the broader media plan.</li>
</ul>
<h2>What Changed on Shopee in 2025 and 2026?</h2>
The most significant change was technical and largely unremarked upon.
In July 2025, Shopee made GMV Max the default bidding mode, phasing out manual keyword campaigns. Under GMV Max, sellers set a budget and target ROAS, leaving Shopee&#8217;s machine learning to control keywords, audiences, and placements across all surfaces.
This mirrors moves by Meta (Advantage+) and Google (Performance Max): removing manual levers to keep decision-making inside a &#8220;black box.&#8221;
As organic reach is squeezed, advertising becomes a &#8220;tenancy fee.&#8221; You are not buying growth; you are paying to reclaim visibility lost to changing rules.
Sea Limited&#8217;s Q2 2026 revenue rose 48% to $7.8 billion. CEO Forrest Li confirmed that higher seller fees drove growth and indicated further room to increase take rates.
Expect marketplace costs to rise again next year. This trajectory is already promised to shareholders, even if your brand team remains unaware.
<h2>How Much Does Selling on Shopee Actually Cost?</h2>
Most brands can quote their advertising cost of sale, and almost none can quote their total platform cost. Those are very different numbers.
&nbsp;
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="8">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Cost line</th>
<th style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Typical level</th>
<th style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Who usually tracks it</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Commission</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Around 6%</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Commercial or finance</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Transaction fee</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Around 2%</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Finance</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Technical support fee</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Around 5%</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Rarely anyone</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Advertising</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Commonly 8% to 10%</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Whoever runs the seller centre login</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Campaign and voucher participation</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Variable, spikes at 9.9, 11.11 and 12.12</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #f3ea3e;">Commercial</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
While rates vary, the core issue remains: total platform costs often exceed 20% of revenue. The fastest-growing cost line is the one least scrutinised by media owners.
<h2>Why Is Your Marketplace Budget Not in Your Media Plan?</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-762" src="https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img2-300x168.png" alt="" width="702" height="393" srcset="https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img2-300x168.png 300w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img2-768x429.png 768w, https://dev-tmm-wp.themmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/shopee-ads-img2.png 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 702px) 100vw, 702px" />
Source: <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1133922012474673622/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pinterest</a>
Because of how these budgets were born.
Marketplace advertising in Singapore and Malaysia almost always started as a trade spend decision. It came out of the commercial or e-commerce line; it was managed by whoever had the Seller Centre password, and it was measured on platform-reported return on ad spend. Meanwhile, the media agency planned Meta, Google, programmatic and offline, and never saw the marketplace number.
That worked when marketplace ads were a small, mechanical spend. It does not work now, for three reasons.
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It is no longer small. For many retail and FMCG brands in this region, marketplace advertising is now among the largest single lines of paid spend, and often the least scrutinised.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It competes with your other channels for the same conversion. A shopper who saw your Meta ad, searched your brand on Google, and then bought via a Shopee ad has been counted by all three. Every platform reports the sale. Your finance team sees it once.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The bidding is now automated, so the strategy moved upstream. When GMV Max sets the bids, the decisions that matter are assortment, pricing, content quality, review volume, and which SKUs you push. Those are commercial and creative decisions, not campaign settings.</li>
</ul>
The uncomfortable version: your marketplace ROAS looks excellent partly because it is harvesting demand your other channels created and your brand already owned. Branded search on a marketplace is the cheapest conversion in the funnel and the least incremental. If your best-performing Shopee campaign is bidding on your own brand name, you are paying rent on customers who arrived asking for you.
<h2>Where Does TikTok Shop Fit?</h2>
Differently, and that difference is the opportunity.
TikTok Shop&#8217;s regional GMV roughly<a href="https://www.techinasia.com/news/southeast-asia-drives-tiktok-shop-gmv-to-45b-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> doubled to 45.6 billion US dollars</a> in 2025, then reached 34.7 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, up around 80% year-on-year from 19.2 billion. On combined platform GMV, it sits at roughly 31% against Shopee&#8217;s 59% and Lazada&#8217;s 9%.
The strategic distinction is demand creation versus demand capture. Shopee is where people go having already decided to buy something. TikTok Shop is where the decision gets made. That makes TikTok Shop genuinely incremental in a way marketplace search advertising usually is not, and it makes creative the deciding input rather than bid strategy.
It also makes it harder, because it requires content volume, creator relationships and livestream operations that most brand teams in this market are not resourced for. Which is precisely why the brands that build that capability now will hold an advantage that a bigger budget cannot buy back later.
Lazada at around 9% warrants selective rather than default investment. Keep it where your category over-indexes, and stop treating a three-platform presence as automatically correct.
<h2>What Should Brands Actually Do Now?</h2>
Five moves, in order of how much money they save.
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Move marketplace advertising into the media plan. Not the budget line, the planning conversation. It should be reviewed by the same people, against the same benchmarks, in the same meeting as Meta and Google. This single change usually surfaces more waste than any optimisation.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Calculate your true platform cost of sale. Commission plus transaction plus technical support plus advertising plus campaign participation, as one number, by category. Most brands discover their marketplace margin is materially thinner than their P&amp;L assumes.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Separate branded from unbranded performance. Report them apart, always. If you cannot see how much of your marketplace ROAS is your own brand name, you cannot tell growth from harvesting.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Fix the inputs GMV Max actually reads. With bidding automated, your leverage is listing content, imagery, review volume, price competitiveness and stock availability. A well-optimised listing lowers your effective cost per click more reliably than any bid adjustment you can still make.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Run a holdout during a mega sale. Suppress marketplace advertising on a matched set of SKUs through 9.9 or 11.11 and compare total units sold, not platform-attributed sales. It is the only way to find out what you are actually buying, and the results tend to be uncomfortable in a useful way.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Frequently Asked Questions</h2>
What is retail media?
Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer or marketplace on its own platform, targeted with its first-party purchase data. In Southeast Asia, the main players are Shopee Ads, Lazada Sponsored Solutions, TikTok Shop and Grab Ads. It sits closest to the point of purchase of any channel.
How much did Shopee&#8217;s advertising revenue grow in 2026?
Shopee&#8217;s advertising revenue grew more than 70% year on year in Q2 2026, with ad take rate up more than 90 basis points. Over the same period, gross merchandise value grew 28%, to 38.3 billion US dollars.
What is Shopee GMV Max?
GMV Max is Shopee&#8217;s automated bidding mode, made the default for most sellers in July 2025. Sellers set a total budget and target return on ad spend, and Shopee&#8217;s machine learning selects keywords, audiences, bids, and placements across search, discovery, video and livestream.
How much does it cost to sell on Shopee?
Beyond advertising, sellers typically face around 6% commission, 2% transaction fee, and 5% technical support fee, with advertising commonly adding 8% to 10%. Rates vary by category, market and seller tier, so the total platform cost frequently exceeds 20% of revenue.
Is Shopee or TikTok Shop bigger in Southeast Asia?
Shopee remains larger, at roughly 59% of combined platform GMV against TikTok Shop&#8217;s 31% and Lazada&#8217;s 9%. TikTok Shop is growing far faster, with first-half 2026 GMV up around 80% year on year.
Is marketplace advertising incremental?
Often less than reported. Marketplace ads sit at the point of purchase and capture demand created elsewhere, particularly on branded search terms. The reliable test is a holdout on matched SKUs measured against total units sold rather than platform-attributed sales.
Who should own marketplace ad budgets?
They should be planned with the rest of paid media, whoever holds the budget line. Marketplace advertising now competes for the same conversions as Meta and Google, so reviewing it separately guarantees double-counting and hides genuine waste.
Should brands still invest in Lazada?
Selectively. At around 9% of combined platform GMV, it no longer justifies automatic inclusion, but it remains worthwhile where a category or market over-indexes there. Treat three-platform presence as a decision, not a default.
<h2>The Bottom Line</h2>
Shopee told its shareholders exactly what it intends to do. Grow monetisation faster than commerce, raise take rate further, and hit a billion dollars of adjusted EBITDA. None of that is hidden, and none of it is unreasonable behaviour for a listed business.
What is unreasonable is a brand treating the fastest-rising line in its cost base as an operational detail managed by whoever has the login.
Retail media is not a channel you are testing. It is a landlord you are already paying. The brands that come out of the next two years with their margin intact will be the ones who started planning it like media, measuring it like media, and negotiating it like rent.
Want to know what your marketplace spend is actually buying?
Message us at hello@themmakers.com, and we will map your true platform cost of sale and pressure-test what is genuinely incremental.
Then read <a href="https://www.themmakers.com/news/malaysia-2026-ai-commerce-flow-strategy?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=article&amp;utm_content=Shopee_Ad_Revenue_and_GMV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Malaysia 2026: Stop Using AI for Speed. Start Using It for Commerce Flow</a> for the wider commerce argument, <a href="https://www.themmakers.com/news/whatsapp-crm-singapore-malaysia-2026?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=article&amp;utm_content=Shopee_Ad_Revenue_and_GMV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WhatsApp is the CRM You Already Have (But Aren&#8217;t Using)</a> for owning the customer relationship the marketplace rents you, and <a href="https://www.themmakers.com/news/trust-vs-price-modern-marketing-singapore?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=article&amp;utm_content=Shopee_Ad_Revenue_and_GMV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Why Trust Has Become More Valuable Than Price in Modern Marketing</a> on competing without discounting.

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Shopees Ad Revenue Grew 70%. Its GMV grew 28%. You Paid the Difference.

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Shopees Ad Revenue Grew 70%. Its GMV grew 28%. You Paid the Difference.

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