Brands urged to pivot to owned channels amidst rising platform fees

Platform fees now reach as high as 20%.

Thai brands clinging to a single e-commerce channel strategy face an increasingly untenable position as platform fees climb and competition intensifies across the retail ecosystem.

Thanawat Malabuppha, CEO and co-founder of Priceza and honorary president of the Thai E-commerce Association, called on brands to overhaul their commercial approach and adopt what he described as a commerce operating system

“Their systems should be a coordinated, multi-pillar strategy that treats each sales channel as an integrated component of a wider commercial architecture,” Malabuppha said during the Retail Asia Summit in Thailand.

Whilst e-commerce continues to grow, Malabuppha noted the market is entering a new phase of maturity — one where profitability is the defining priority

Central to Malabuppha's proposed operating system is the idea that brands must simultaneously manage four distinct commercial pillars, namely marketplace presence, quick commerce, owned digital channels, and loyalty-driven customer retention.

Marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop remain essential for demand capture, he acknowledged, given their tens of millions of active users in Thailand.

However, with platform fees now reaching 20% — and advertising costs adding another 10% to 20% on top — brands that rely exclusively on these platforms are surrendering up to half of their revenue before covering other costs.

Malabuppha noted that all three major platforms have been raising fees in a near-simultaneous fashion, further squeezing seller margins.

Quick commerce represents the second pillar, catering to Thailand's high-frequency purchase behaviour. "Thai people order three times a day," he said, underscoring the commercial significance of on-demand fulfilment at speed

The most strategically urgent message for brands was Malabuppha's case for building owned channels — whether websites, LINE Official Accounts, mobile applications, or loyalty programmes — as a mechanism to convert marketplace customers into direct, fee-free relationships over time

The solution, he argued, is to leverage the first marketplace transaction to acquire a customer, then migrate repeat purchases to owned channels using incentives such as loyalty points, exclusive coupons, or premium after-sales services.

"How can you strategise across each channel and how can you monetise the user from the marketplace to be your own direct customer?" he asked. "Move them over."