Which growth is worth paying for? SEA retail leaders rethink the true cost of platform-dependent growth

As platform costs rise and customer data becomes harder to own, retailers are questioning which channels create real long-term value.

Marketplace commissions across Southeast Asia are climbing sharply, with one senior retail leader reporting a threefold increase within six months. For an industry already operating on thin margins, that kind of pressure is reshaping how retailers think about scale itself. The conversation amongst senior retail leaders is no longer about how fast they can grow on platforms like Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and Grab. It is about which growth is actually worth paying for.

This shift in thinking emerged in discussions with the iMedia Retail Summit Southeast Asia Advisory Board, a group of senior retail executives from across the region brought together to pressure-test its most urgent commercial priorities.

“The clearest signal was that senior retail leaders in Southeast Asia are no longer asking how to grow faster,” said Helena Stylman, Managing Director ANZ and SEA, iMedia Summits (Comexposium), in an interview with Retail Asia. “They're asking which growth is actually worth paying for.”

Retailers across the region are absorbing rising platform commissions, higher customer acquisition costs, steeper fulfilment expectations, and increasingly aggressive promotional environments. Much of the growth driving those costs runs through ecosystems where they do not fully control customer data, pricing or loyalty. What works in Singapore is often structurally different from what works in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand or the Philippines, so a single regional playbook rarely survives contact with the next market.

For leadership teams, this is turning growth into a more complex commercial equation. “What has changed is the cost of accessing that growth,” Stylman explained, noting how retailers have started to look beyond topline sales.

They are examining the quality of revenue, margin sustainability, as well as whether their investments are strengthening direct customer relationships or increasing dependency on external platforms. The discussions also revealed how profitability has quickly become the centre of retail decision-making.

As a result, retailers are becoming more selective about where they invest, which channels they prioritise, and what they are willing to subsidise in the name of scale.

Marketplace scale versus customer ownership

One of the sharpest tensions facing retailers today is how to balance marketplace reach with long-term customer ownership.

Marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop remain essential for growth in Southeast Asia, particularly in mobile-first and social commerce-driven markets. But deeper platform reliance often comes at a cost: reduced control over pricing, loyalty and first-party customer data. That trade-off has become a major leadership concern.

“The majority of board respondents said they would invest in building owned customer channels, even if it meant slower near-term growth,” Stylman said. 

A smaller group would double down on marketplace presence and accept the margin trade-off.  Both positions are commercially defensible, and both carry risk. The strongest operators are not treating this as a binary choice. They are using marketplaces for reach while building stronger direct relationships through loyalty ecosystems, owned digital channels and customer data strategies.

Notably, the discussion around data ownership has also evolved beyond marketing. “When platforms control discovery, hold the customer data and influence the pricing environment, retailers lose many of the levers that traditionally drove loyalty and lifetime value,” Stylman said.

Retailers, she stressed, are now reassessing how they personalise experiences and create reasons for customers to return directly rather than through third-party platforms. In many cases, loyalty is no longer simply about discounts or rewards programmes. It is becoming a broader question of who truly owns the customer relationship.

Why execution, not strategy, is the real blocker

Even as retailers refine their commercial thinking, the harder challenge is making change happen inside the business. “Strategy is not always the binding constraint in Southeast Asian retail. Execution often is,” Stylman said.

The advisory board was clear that organisational resistance, capability gaps, and data quality are the real blockers to change. 

Retailers may know what needs to be done, but translating that into coordinated action across markets as diverse as Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines is where most initiatives stall. The same rollout can demand different teams, payment systems, and logistics models in each market, so strategy may be regional, but execution has to be country by country.

AI accountability and the discoverability challenge

At the same time, retail leaders are demanding greater accountability from emerging technologies, particularly AI.

The urgency is partly commercial: as algorithms on platforms like TikTok Shop, Shopee, and Lazada increasingly control how customers find and choose products, staying visible has become a capability in its own right, not just a marketing outcome. That connects AI directly to the customer ownership debate, because discoverability is now one of the most valuable, and most platform-dependent, levers a retailer has.

“Retailers do not want less AI. They want more honest AI. They do not want a broad discussion about what AI could do one day. They want specific use cases, real numbers and honest assessments of what has not worked,” Stylman emphasised, noting content generation, personalisation, demand forecasting, operational automation, and customer service as the strongest use cases.

“The board was direct,” Stylman added. “If you cannot measure it, it is not ready.”

These conversations will sit at the centre of iMedia Retail Summit Southeast Asia 2026, an invitation-only gathering of senior retail leaders examining how to grow sustainably without surrendering margin, customer ownership or control to platform-dependent models.

The summit, which will be held from 30 September to 2 October 2026 at the Angsana Teluk Bahang, will also tackle challenges such as the profitability of social commerce, loyalty beyond discounting, platform dependency, and the operational complexity of scaling in fragmented markets.

For more information, visit https://www.imediasummits.com/retailsea.