At present, the saturation of the domestic e-commerce market continues to increase, traffic costs are rising, and price competition is intensifying. More and more merchants are beginning to look overseas.
But behind the craze for going overseas, a common dilemma has gradually surfaced.
On the one hand, brands face many market choices, but the rules, user habits, and language of each market are different.
On the other hand, the information available to brands is fragmented and operational processes are complex, ultimately making growth results difficult to predict.
Faced with the must-answer question of going overseas, many businesses cannot find an option that can give a definite answer.
What Chinese businesses really need is not a lucky breakout opportunity, but a set of proven business methods and market environment that can be replicated and cultivated in the long term.
On May 22, 2026, the TikTok Shop Southeast Asia Cross-border E-commerce Annual Summit was held in Guangzhou.
This summit sent a clear signal: a set of Southeast Asian overseas growth methods customized for Chinese businesses has taken shape.
Next, based on the growth data and strategies released at the summit, we will break down the specific components of this method and why it can become the current preferred solution for going overseas.
Key data helps businesses seize growth opportunities
First, let’s take a look at the key data released at the conference.
It can be seen from official data that TikTok Shop’s cross-border e-commerce in Southeast Asia will have a year-on-year GMV growth of 125% in 2025.
The growth rate of major promotion nodes continues to rise. In 2025, the 6.6 major promotion will increase by 123%, Double 11 will increase by 230%, and Double 12 will increase by 270%; in 2026, the 6.6 major promotion will reach a new high, with a year-on-year increase of 106%.
The model of short video and live broadcast-driven transactions continues to be verified. In 2025, the GMV of short videos increased by 257% during Double 12. This year’s Ramadan promotion in Malaysia, the GMV of live broadcast sales increased by 104%. On June 6, the single-day content field turnover (short video + live broadcast) reached 1.7 times the same period last year.
It can be seen that growth is not an occasional event, but a trend with continuity and regularity.
TikTok Shop Southeast Asia cross-border e-commerce data shows that currently more than 40% of Southeast Asia’s cross-border merchants have domestic e-commerce background; the unit price of high-quality merchants on the platform has increased 1.2 times year-on-year, and the ordering cycle for new merchants has been shortened by 15 days.
With their mature supply chain systems and refined operational capabilities, these merchants are filling the gap in local consumption in Southeast Asia.
There is another set of data worthy of our attention. In 2025, the number of merchants in two or more Southeast Asian countries on TikTok Shop’s Southeast Asian cross-border e-commerce platform will increase by 70% year-on-year. The average annual GMV growth rate of these merchants will reach 109%, which is much higher than merchants operating in a single market.
At the same time, compared with 2024, the number of cross-border alliance mobile sales experts has increased by 169%, and the number of million-dollar goods sales experts has increased by 2.3 times.
Content production capabilities and multi-market operation capabilities are jointly determining the growth ceiling of merchants.
This shows that multi-market layout and regular self-made content output are two key factors that widen the growth gap between merchants.
Secondly, we see definite opportunities in the Southeast Asian market.
1. The market’s sinking space.
The e-commerce penetration rate in Southeast Asia is 11%, which still has more than double the room for growth compared to domestic e-commerce.
In addition, consumption growth is extending from core cities to new regions such as the outer islands of the Philippines and East Malaysia.
TikTok Shop Southeast Asia’s cross-border e-commerce will increase resource investment in these regions this year, and new entrants will have first-mover advantages.
2.
Category gaps caused by consumption upgrades.
TikTok Shop Southeast Asia cross-border e-commerce data shows that the GMV of the massage device category increased by more than 10 times, and the unit price increased by 57% within 3 months; the GMV of hairdressing and personal care appliances increased by 222%; the GMV of health care products increased by 262%; and the GMV of pet products increased by 235%.
Even daily-necessary categories such as clothing and basic skin care all grew by more than 126%.
The per capita GDP of the five Southeast Asian countries continues to rise, and consumers are shifting from meeting basic needs to pursuing quality life.
So there are a lot of category gaps waiting for brands to fill.
3.
Content e-commerce has become mainstream.
Some industry organizations predict that Southeast Asia’s content e-commerce market coverage will reach 85% of the overall e-commerce market in 2026.
From watching short videos to being planted and then placing orders instantly, this consumption path has become mainstream.
This is the area where domestic businesses are best at, and the efficiency of capacity translation is relatively high.
Three major strategies: giving businesses more certainty when going global
These directions are not just judgments, they have been verified by some businesses.
At the summit, four brands, Lefant, Colorkey, Bodiary and Silk, shared their actual overseas experience.
The four brands have different starting points and different paths, covering four typical models: technological innovation-driven category peaking, localized transformation of mature domestic operating experience, white-label brand transformation, and traditional domestic brands breaking through into new markets.
The four brands each have their own strategies, but they all point to the same conclusion: Southeast Asia is still the first stop for domestic businesses to go overseas with high efficiency.
And their commonalities are also very clear. They follow the rhythm of the platform, deeply explore local needs, and insist on long-term operations.
But in addition to these successful cases, there are many more businesses that are still exploring overseas.
They will also encounter many thorny problems, such as cumbersome multi-country operation processes, high content production costs, and inability to keep up with logistics and after-sales. These problems trouble people who are preparing to enter the market or are just starting out every day.
The three major strategies announced by TikTok Shop for cross-border e-commerce in Southeast Asia are aimed at the practical problems these merchants will encounter.
Strategy 1: Increase the number of Chinese brands going overseas.
The platform will continue to increase support for mature leading brands and emerging brands, optimize the entry incentive system, and reduce the difficulty of cold start for new brands.
Simultaneously open up second-hand luxury goods, jewelry and other high-priced categories to expand merchant growth tracks.
At the same time, it iterates the entire chain system of brand access, logistics fulfillment, quality control and after-sales, to create a complete Southeast Asian business ecosystem for Chinese brands.
Strategy 2: Improve the efficiency of global operations and make merchant operations easier.
In response to the pain points of cumbersome and inefficient operations for merchants operating in multiple countries, the platform has launched multi-country sales evaluation interoperability, multi-store customer service interoperability, and a unified data backend. It will also implement functions such as one-click product distribution in five countries, smart pricing, and multi-country shared inventory to solve the problems of repeated operations in multiple markets and cross-border distribution.
At the same time, merchants can use short video AI translation, live broadcast real-time translation of small languages, and cross-regional content distribution to break down the barriers to cross-border content operations, reduce content creation and cross-border operating costs, and achieve one-time creation and monetization in multiple countries.
Strategy 3: Accelerate platform infrastructure upgrade.
The platform will continue to optimize business rules and create a more stable operating environment.
At the same time, it iterates the cross-border fulfillment link, improves export tax exemption and tax refund, large-piece direct mail, and border warehouse supporting services, and achieves logistics cost reduction and acceleration.
By optimizing the after-sales and exchange system, we can improve the trust and repurchase rate of local consumers.
These three strategies can provide specific solutions to the efficiency, threshold, infrastructure and other problems encountered by merchants in multi-country operations.
Merchants with different starting points, from white labels to brands, from domestic transformation to localized operations, can all find growth paths in this system.
At the end of the summit, Xu Mengqi, general manager of Southeast Asia cross-border e-commerce at TikTok Shop, gave a summary to the more than 1,300 merchants and online audiences present: the Southeast Asian market is still growing explosively, the online rate of e-commerce is increasing rapidly, the trend of consumption upgrading is obvious, China has huge space for high-quality supply, and now is the time to enter; content e-commerce is the future trend, and TikTok
Shop is the most preferred platform; merchants that insist on multi-market layout and invest deeply in content will grow faster and have a higher business ceiling.
He also said that what the platform needs to do is to help everyone lower the threshold for going overseas, reduce operating costs, expand profit margins, and allow everyone to operate with ease and take root in the long term.
In the future, the platform will use the most practical policies, the most powerful support, and the most complete services to work with all merchants to bring good domestic products to every corner of Southeast Asia.
It is foreseeable that the growth space of the Southeast Asian market has not yet peaked, and the efficiency of multi-market linkage operations is significantly higher than that of single market trials. TikTok Shop Southeast Asia cross-border e-commerce has provided a support system from entry to long-term operation.
For merchants, the core task is to systematically transfer mature domestic e-commerce operation capabilities to this new market.
For Chinese businesses who are looking for a deterministic growth path, the direction is relatively clear.
When it comes to exporting domestic trade overseas, Southeast Asia is the first stop right now; when it comes to planning for Southeast Asia, TikTok Shop is the proven platform of choice for cross-border e-commerce in Southeast Asia.
