HONG KONG, Nov 10, 2026 - (ACN Newswire) - Two press releases bookended 2026 for anyone tracking Southeast Asian ecommerce. In April, Momentum Works reported that the region's platform ecommerce gross merchandise value reached $157.6 billion in 2025, up 22.8 percent. In October, Google, Temasek and Bain published the eleventh e-Conomy SEA report, projecting ecommerce GMV of $226 billion for 2026, an 18 percent rise from $191 billion the year before. Both were covered as straightforward facts. Neither can be read that way once you ask what each one is counting.
This is not a story about one institute being wrong. It is a story about a market whose most quoted number does not have a stable definition, and about what happens to sellers and regulators when the scoreboard itself is negotiable.
What each report actually says
The e-Conomy SEA 2026 report, released on 21 October 2026 by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, puts the region's digital economy at a projected $368 billion in GMV for 2026, up 17 percent, with ecommerce the largest single sector at $226 billion, up 18 percent from $191 billion in 2025 (Bain & Company, 2026-10-21, link 🔗). The Straits Times coverage confirms the 2025 base of $191 billion, measured across ten Southeast Asian countries.
Momentum Works' fourth annual Ecommerce in Southeast Asia report, published 14 April 2026, counts differently. Its headline is platform GMV only: $157.6 billion for 2025 across the six core markets, plus an estimated $27.8 billion in non-platform ecommerce, for an all-channel total of $185.5 billion (Momentum Works via TechNode Global, 2026-04-14, link 🔗).
Table 1: The two headline claims, side by side, with each report's own stated scope
Source: Bain & Company 🔗 and TechNode Global 🔗
Notice what the table does not show. There is no year in which the two reports publish the same quantity. The closest comparison is 2025: $191 billion against $185.5 billion. That 3 percent gap looks manageable. It is not the gap that matters.
The platform share that quietly fell
Momentum Works' own series contains a shift that received far less attention than the headline. Platform GMV was 89 percent of all ecommerce in 2024. In 2025 it was 85 percent. The missing 15 percent, roughly $27.8 billion, moved through channels that are not marketplaces: brand sites, chat commerce, and direct social selling that never touches a platform checkout.
The report's data also shows where transaction volume is concentrating. Content commerce, the mix of livestream, short video and creator-driven selling, generated $49.7 billion in 2025, which is 32 percent of platform GMV, up from 20 percent a year earlier. In other words, nearly a third of what the platforms book is triggered by feeds rather than search, and the share of value escaping platforms entirely is growing in the same direction.
If that were true only as a mild definitional drift, it would be a curiosity. The regulatory record in Indonesia suggests it is more than that. When the Ministry of Trade replaced Permendag 31/2023 with Permendag 19/2026, signed 8 June 2026, it extended coverage to eight business models including ride-hailing and online travel, precisely because commerce had spread past the marketplaces the older rule assumed (SOEDJA explainer, 2026 🔗). The scoreboard's denominator changed; the rules are still catching up.
Indonesia: the $13 billion disagreement
Now the number that cannot be reconciled by rounding. e-Conomy SEA 2025 put Indonesia's ecommerce GMV at $71 billion in 2025, about 72 percent of the country's digital economy. Momentum Works puts Indonesia's 2025 GMV at $57.7 billion, and its growth at just 2.2 percent year on year, slowed by Bukalapak's retreat from physical goods and Tokopedia's post-acquisition rationalisation under TikTok's control.
The gap is $13.3 billion, about 23 percent of the smaller figure. Here is the part worth sitting with: each number is internally consistent. Indonesia at $71 billion of $191 billion is 37.2 percent of the region. Indonesia at $57.7 billion of $157.6 billion is 36.6 percent. Both reports agree Indonesia is roughly 37 percent of Southeast Asian ecommerce. They disagree by 23 percent on the size of the whole. Whatever is driving the gap sits in the definition of ecommerce itself, not in Indonesia's arithmetic.
Candidate explanations are not hard to find. e-Conomy covers ten countries and counts a broader set of transaction types; Momentum Works counts six markets and books only what flows through marketplace checkouts, estimating the rest. Neither publisher has published a bridge table reconciling the two, and no regulator has an interest in forcing one. The practical consequence lands on anyone making a market-sizing decision: choose the wrong denominator and Indonesia's growth story flips from "largest and stalling" to "largest and only just keeping up", because a 2.2 percent year's growth on $57.7 billion and an implied mid-single-digit rate on $71 billion are very different commissioning decisions.
The growth table sharpens the point. On Momentum Works' numbers, 2025 growth in the six core markets ran: Thailand 51.8 percent, Malaysia 47.6 percent, the Philippines 32.0 percent, Vietnam 27.3 percent, Singapore 21.0 percent, Indonesia 2.2 percent. The regional headline of 22.8 percent is an average that no single large market matches. Indonesia, the biggest market, is the only one below it.
Table 2: Momentum Works' 2025 growth readings for the six core Southeast Asian markets
Source: TechNode Global 🔗
The TikTok Shop double that is two different numbers
Third-party coverage introduced its own confusion this year. Widely shared write-ups of the Momentum Works report described TikTok Shop reaching $54.6 billion in 2025, a doubling from $22.6 billion in 2024. The $54.6 billion figure is real, but it is TikTok Shop and Tokopedia combined, the merged entity that reached 65.7 percent of Shopee's GMV. TikTok Shop on its own booked about $45.6 billion, roughly a 102 percent increase, while Tokopedia contributed roughly $9 billion after what the report describes as GMV rationalisation.
Both "TikTok Shop doubled" and "TikTok Shop grew 54 percent" appeared in print in 2026. Both are defensible under different scopes. Neither is the whole picture, and the merged-entity framing makes the challenger look closer to the leader than standalone numbers would suggest. Shopee's own $83.2 billion in 2025, worth a 53 percent platform share, grew 24.5 percent, so the challenger's absolute add of about $19.2 billion exceeded the leader's add of about $16.4 billion even while the leader kept its margin of scale.
Meanwhile Lazada, the third of the three platforms that together hold 98.8 percent of platform GMV, booked about $18 billion, a fall of 28 percent in a market that grew 22.8 percent. Concentration and churn are happening at once: the top three hold almost everything, and the number three is shrinking faster than any of the growth rates above.
One question, four market share answers
Ask what share of Indonesian ecommerce Shopee holds and the published record offers at least four answers, depending on who is measuring and how. A user survey by APJII, the Indonesian internet association, put Shopee's user-preference share at 47.5 percent in its 2026 survey, down from 53.2 percent the year before, with Lazada falling from 9.1 to 6.2 percent. Cube's tracking panel, as cited in report commentary, had Shopee at 59 percent of combined platform GMV for full-year 2025 and 55 percent in the first half of 2026, with TikTok Shop climbing from 31 to 39 percent. A scraping-based estimate cited in regional coverage puts Shopee near 38 percent. A skincare-only dataset puts it at 62 percent for that category, which is accurate for skincare and irrelevant for the market.
These are not four measurements of one thing. A survey measures which app people say they use. A panel measures tracked transactions. Scraping measures listings or prices at intervals. A category dataset measures one vertical. The knowledge base entry that tracks this conflict records all four side by side and declines to pick a winner, which is the correct editorial decision. The mistake to avoid is quoting 47.5 percent and 59 percent in the same sentence as if they disagreed about the same quantity. They do not.
The seller does not get to pick a measurement. The seller gets a settlement statement.
The 30 percent the seller never keeps
Sea Limited's financial statements give the cost side of the ledger that GMV headlines omit. Cost of services for Southeast Asian ecommerce reached $9.5 billion in fiscal 2025, and sales and marketing expense was $3.55 billion (Sea Ltd FY2025 results). Add the platform's commission, payment fees, logistics charges, and the advertising and affiliate costs needed to be visible in a content-driven feed, and seller-side estimates put total operating deductions above 30 percent of the selling price for many merchants. One percentage point of fees on Indonesia's $71 billion base is worth roughly $710 million a year, which is why fee policy became a cabinet-level topic in Jakarta within a single quarter.
The trigger was specific. On 18 May 2026, TikTok Shop raised its commission cap from Rp40,000 to Rp650,000 per item, a more than fifteen-fold increase. Shopee raised the service fee on its free-shipping programme in the same window. Indonesia's Minister of MSMEs responded publicly that there must be no fee increases for now, and by 1 July 2026 the government and five platforms, Shopee, Tokopedia, TikTok Shop, Lazada and Blibli, had agreed to postpone further increases for small merchants.
What followed is the part that matters for reading the region's numbers. Two regulations arrived in June 2026, and neither caps fees. Permendag 19/2026 requires fee transparency, seller consent for changes with a 14-working-day objection window, priority for domestic products in search results, and labels on AI-generated content. Permen UMKM 3/2026 orders at least a 50 percent service-fee discount for verified micro and small sellers of local products, but implementation slipped: announced for 1 August, then moved to the end of October 2026, and still awaiting full system integration through the ministry's SAPA UMKM platform (ANTARA, 2026-10-07, link 🔗). Around 42,000 local product sellers had been identified for the programme, against a Trade Ministry count of 22 million ecommerce merchants, fewer than 10 percent of whom hold a business identification number, the very credential the discount depends on.
So the region's headline growth is booked in dollars while the policy response is calibrated in rupiah, and the two systems of record barely touch. A discount that reaches 42,000 verified sellers cannot move a $71 billion or a $57.7 billion denominator much in 2026. It can move an election-year narrative.
What an AI buyer does to this accounting
The e-Conomy SEA 2026 report adds a consumer layer to all of this. Across a survey of 9,006 AI users in six countries, 69 percent say they use AI to compare products, and 75 percent express willingness to let AI agents find the best price and complete a purchase on their behalf. Trust is conditional: 44 percent want robust privacy safeguards, 36 percent want clear operating limits, and 30 percent want the ability to undo an agent's actions (Bain & Company, 2026-10-21).
The platforms have already built for this. Lazada's AI shopping assistant has roughly 100 million users, and orders guided by it carry an average value about 75 percent higher than other orders; the report cites a 10 percent year-on-year conversion lift from Shopee's AI tools and a 10 to 15 percent conversion uplift for sellers using AI listing tools. More than 8,000 Tmall brands have joined Lazada since September, and about 330,000 vendors use its AI customer service.
Follow the money one step and the tension appears. Platform fees fund the ranking, the feed and the free-shipping programmes that produce the GMV. An agent that compares prices across platforms and buys where value is highest weakens the link between paying for visibility and making the sale. If even a fraction of the 75 percent shifts to delegated purchasing, the cost stack that already exceeds 30 percent of selling price buys less, and the same GMV supports less platform revenue per order. The 93 percent who told the survey they trust AI in their purchasing journey were not asked who pays for their trust.
What cannot be true at the same time
Classifying the conflicts above by type, because the type determines whether anything is actually wrong:
Mathematical contradiction: none found. Every headline number is internally consistent with its own stated denominators. The $13.3 billion Indonesia gap survives full internal consistency on both sides.Definitional divergence, misreported as disagreement: the $191 billion against $185.5 billion comparison, the platform share of 89 versus 85 percent, and the four Shopee market share figures. Different quantities, presented as one.Scope ambiguity, exploited by framing: the TikTok Shop $45.6 billion standalone against $54.6 billion combined figure. Both published, both defensible, one flattering.A real tension, not yet a contradiction: top-three concentration at 98.8 percent alongside a 28 percent decline at the number three platform, while seller-side costs exceed 30 percent of price and fee regulation proceeds without a cap.The verdict, then, is not that Southeast Asia's ecommerce boom is exaggerated. The growth is real, and the 22.8 percent platform growth in 2025 sits on transaction records, not surveys. The verdict is that the region's most consequential number has no agreed definition, that its second-largest ambiguity (Indonesia, again) is exactly where the regulatory intervention is heaviest, and that anyone quoting $226 billion or $157.6 billion in a boardroom owes the room a denominator first.
Methodology
Data as of November 2026. Primary metric: ecommerce gross merchandise value (GMV), the value of goods sold through online channels, which each publisher defines differently and no piece reconciles post hoc. Sources: the Google, Temasek and Bain e-Conomy SEA 2026 release (21 October 2026), its 2025 base figures as reported by The Straits Times, the Momentum Works Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2026 release (14 April 2026) as carried by TechNode Global, Sea Limited fiscal 2025 financial disclosures, and Indonesian regulatory texts and ministry statements from June to October 2026. Denominators used: platform GMV (six markets, Momentum Works definition), all-channel GMV (platform plus estimated non-platform), and e-Conomy's ten-country ecommerce GMV. Growth rates are year on year unless stated. No adjustments, currency conversions or reweightings were applied to any published figure; the 23 percent Indonesia gap is computed from the two published values without interpolation. The share figures in the market share section are reported as published, including where they conflict.
Limitations
Third-party tracker figures (Cube, APJII) were read through secondary reporting, not the underlying panels.Sea Limited's cost of services covers group ecommerce costs, so the 30 percent seller cost share is an estimate, not a filing.The e-Conomy 2026 ecommerce figure is a projection made in October 2026, not an outcome.Sources
Bain & Company 🔗 - e-Conomy SEA 2026 press release, 21 October 2026TechNode Global 🔗 - Momentum Works, Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2026, 14 April 2026The Straits Times 🔗 - Southeast Asia's digital economy to hit US$368b in 2026, 21 October 2026SOEDJA 🔗 - Indonesia's new marketplace rules explained, 2026ANTARA News 🔗 - Indonesia to cut e-commerce fees 50 percent for eligible local MSMEs, 7 October 2026This article was prepared by the expert team at Global Infinity Labs, drawing on insights and data provided through its MCP data services.
About Global Infinity Labs
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