How advertising works inside Shopee, TikTok Shop and Lazada

A regional media plan for Southeast Asia usually carries one line called marketplace advertising, with a budget and a target return beside it. Carried into Vietnam, that line quietly holds three different purchases.

On Shopee and Lazada, the money buys a place in front of people who are already comparing products. On TikTok Shop, it buys a place in front of people who were watching something else. The first behaves roughly like the search advertising a head office already knows. The second does not, and most of its cost never appears in the advertising account at all.

This piece describes what each platform actually sells, what decides whether the spend returns anything, and what a foreign brand should settle before the first campaign. The fee deductions on each order, and why in-platform return figures read high, are covered in a separate piece in this cluster.

Three platforms, three different purchases

The platforms are not three versions of one channel. The share of sales differs, the thing being bought differs, and the cost that matters sits in different places.

Two of these are the same mechanism at very different scale. The third is a different mechanism altogether, and it is the one growing fastest: TikTok Shop's share rose from 33% to 44% year on year in the same Q&Me estimate, while Shopee's fell from 61% to 53%.

Before any advertising: the account sits inside the store

On Meta or Google, the advertising account is a thing of its own. A company can hold it while an agency runs it, and move the agency without moving the account.

Marketplace advertising does not work that way. On Shopee and Lazada, advertising is bought from inside the seller's back office and paid from a balance attached to the store. On TikTok Shop, the ads account is separate but has to be linked to the shop before shop campaigns can run.

The consequence for a foreign brand is direct: whoever holds the store holds the advertising history. If a distributor or an enabler opens the store for practical reasons, the bidding history, the campaign results and the review record that makes future advertising cheaper all accumulate on their side of the relationship.

That may be the right trade in year one. It should be written down as a trade, with what transfers at the end, before the first campaign rather than after the first disagreement. The same principle applies to every other account a partner holds on your behalf, and it is covered under choosing and overseeing a local agency.

The other decision taken at this stage is store type. Shopee Mall, LazMall and TikTok Shop's official brand stores mark a storefront run by or for the brand. For a foreign brand in a category where buyers worry about counterfeits, that badge does part of the work advertising would otherwise have to do.

Shopee: paying to be compared

Shopee sells three broad kinds of placement: in search results when a shopper types a relevant term, in recommendation slots on similar product pages, and shop-level placements that promote the store rather than one item. Most of it is charged per click through an auction, and the bid can be set by hand for each keyword or left to automated bidding against a target return.

The part that matters sits after the click. The shopper lands on the listing an unpaid visitor would have seen, beside the same competing listings. Advertising brings more people to that comparison. It does not change how the comparison goes.

For an entrant, that creates a cost pattern a regional team rarely expects: a new listing is expensive to advertise, and gets cheaper on its own. It starts with no reviews and no units sold, so it converts worse than established listings next to it, and every order costs more at the same bid. As orders accumulate, reviews and sales count build up, conversion rises, and the cost per order falls without any change to the campaign.

An illustrative sequence, with the cost per click held flat:

The figures are invented to show the shape, not benchmarks. The shape itself is the point. A first-month read of this listing says the channel costs three times what it will cost at steady state, and a regional team that sets its target from that month will either cut the channel early or accept a target that is far too loose later.

Two practical rules follow. Judge Shopee on weeks five to twelve, at a steady price and a steady budget. And fund the first weeks deliberately as the cost of building a listing, not as a test of whether the channel works.

TikTok Shop: paying for reach, then paying again per sale

On TikTok Shop, advertising does not send anyone to a page built for comparison. It pushes a video or a livestream, with the product attached, to people who were not looking for it. TikTok has been moving advertisers toward automated campaigns such as GMV Max, where the brand sets a budget and a target and the system decides which content to show to whom.

That changes where the work is. If the video does not hold attention in its first seconds, no listing behind it can recover the sale, and paying to show it to more people only makes the same weak result more expensive.

It also changes where the cost is. A sale on TikTok Shop typically carries three kinds of cost, and only the first is in the ads account:

• Advertising to distribute the content.
• Content production: shooting and editing, presenters, the people who run livestreams.
• Creator commissions on orders that come through a creator's video or livestream, sometimes with a fixed fee and product samples on top.

For a foreign brand, three points follow that do not come up in a home-market plan.

Global assets rarely carry the weight. Content that works on TikTok Shop is made locally, in Vietnamese, by people who look like the buyer's own feed. Adapting a global campaign is a legitimate choice, but it is a channel decision with a cost in performance, not a saving — a point developed under which channels matter in Vietnam.

Volume depends on output, not only on budget. A video that sells well tends to wear out quickly, because the same people have already seen it. Holding sales steady means renewing content every week, and growing them means more content, more presenters and more creators to manage.

Creators speak for the brand without being briefed like an agency. In regulated categories such as supplements, cosmetics and food for children, a claim made in a creator's livestream is still a claim about your product. Someone on the brand's side has to own the brief, the list of claims that may not be made, and the review of what went out.

Lazada: smaller, and occasionally still the right line

Lazada's advertising works on the same principle as Shopee's: paid placement in search results and recommendation slots, and an affiliate programme alongside. The difference is scale. On Q&Me's estimate, Lazada accounted for about 3% of the gross merchandise value of the four largest platforms over the twelve months to April 2026.

For most entrants, that puts Lazada behind the other two in the budget. There are three situations where it earns a line anyway:

• A regional agreement already covers Vietnam. If the brand has a group-level arrangement with Lazada elsewhere in the region, the Vietnamese store may come with it, and running it at low intensity costs little.
• Its official-store section is where your buyers check authenticity. In some categories, LazMall is part of how a buyer confirms that a product is genuine, whatever share of the final sale it takes.
• The category is under-served there. A smaller platform with fewer sellers in the category can be cheaper to lead in, provided the category's buyers use it at all.

None of these is a reason to split the first-year budget evenly across three platforms. Concentrating on one platform until its numbers can be read is almost always the better use of a limited budget.

How the platforms feed each other

A shopper who sees a product in a TikTok video does not always buy there. Some go to Shopee, search for the product by name, and buy it where they can compare prices and read reviews. Shopee's search advertising then records the sale.

In a regional report, that looks like a strong Shopee return and a weak TikTok Shop one. Cut TikTok Shop on that evidence and Shopee's branded searches tend to fall a few weeks later, for reasons nobody connects to the cut.

The practical response is to read the platforms as one group before reading them separately:

• Report total marketplace sales as the first line, with the platform split beneath it.
• Change one platform's budget at a time, in steps, and read all three platforms after each step, not only the one that changed.
• Track branded search on Shopee — searches for the brand's own name — through the weeks when TikTok Shop spend rises or falls.

None of this recovers order-level attribution across platforms. It replaces a question that has no reliable answer with one that does. Why the per-order view breaks down, and what to put in its place, is covered under marketing measurement.

Setting targets from head office

A target return is the most common thing a head office sends to Vietnam, and the easiest to get wrong from a distance. Four adjustments make it usable.

Set it on money received, not on order value. In-platform return figures are calculated on order value before most of the deductions on each order. A target set on that basis will be met while the channel loses money.

Set a different target for each platform. On Shopee most of the acquisition cost sits in the ads account. On TikTok Shop much of it does not. The same return target applied to both rewards the platform whose report leaves more out.

Set it after the launch period, not from it. The first four weeks measure the cost of building a listing and finding working content. A target set from those weeks is either unreachable or, once the listing matures, far too easy.

Separate campaign days from ordinary days. Double-date sale days such as 9.9, 11.11 and 12.12 change conversion, discount depth and advertising prices all at once. A month containing one of them is not comparable with a month that does not.

What the head office should receive monthly is one figure per platform: money received, less advertising spend, less creator and affiliate commissions. That is a figure a board can compare across markets, which a return ratio calculated three different ways cannot be.

What to ask whoever will run it

Most foreign brands will have a local agency or enabler run marketplace advertising, at least in the first year. Five questions, asked before signing, show quickly whether the partner reads the channel the way the brand will need it read:

• Which report will you use for our results: the sales dashboard or the settlement report?
• Where will creator commissions and content costs appear in the monthly report?
• How will you set bids in the first eight weeks, while the listing has no reviews?
• Who holds the store, the ads balance and the creator relationships, and what transfers if we part?
• What result would make you recommend spending less on a platform?

The last question matters most. A partner paid on a share of spend, or on sales volume, has no natural reason to suggest spending less, and the answer shows whether they have thought about it anyway.

Where the figures in this article come from

The platform shares are from Q&Me's Vietnam E-commerce Market Report 2026, as reported by The Investor on 3 June 2026. It covers May 2025 to April 2026 and the four largest platforms, with combined gross merchandise value of about $13.6 billion: Shopee 53% (61% a year earlier), TikTok Shop 44% (33%), Lazada 3%.

Gross merchandise value measures orders placed, before cancellations, returns and seller-funded discounts, so it describes where buying happens rather than where sellers make money. Other trackers, measuring different periods in different ways, put the split somewhat differently; the direction — Shopee leading, TikTok Shop close and rising, Lazada far behind — is consistent across them.

The cold-start table is illustrative and uses invented numbers.

Where this work stops

MWY does not run advertising, operate stores, manage creators, or take commission from any platform, agency or creator.

Deciding which platforms to enter, in what order, with what budget and what targets, is part of Go-to-Market Strategy. Once spending is live, rebuilding what each platform actually returns from the settlement, advertising and affiliate reports, and holding the head office report to that figure each month, is Digital Marketing Advisory & Oversight. On marketplaces the scope covers advertising, promotions, live selling, affiliate and store conversion; cost of goods, inventory, fulfilment and returns handling sit outside it, and any margin used in the analysis is a figure the company supplies.