In her latest column, Charlotte McEleny looks at live commerce across APAC, and why success requires the right operational infrastructure…

Southeast Asia’s social commerce market reached USD 47.58 bn (approx. £37.4bn) in 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of over 31%. Indonesia leads the region, with 70% of consumers actively engaging in social shopping, outpacing India at 62% and China at 49%. Across the region, infrastructure is being built, consumer behaviour is being conditioned, and platforms are being embedded. Zoom out to APAC and the picture is the same: the region accounted for 66% of the global live commerce market in 2024, on a trajectory to nearly six-fold by 2030.

The market opportunity is unambiguous, but the brands that will actually capture it are those prepared to build the operational infrastructure to support it.

"This shift is real, but often misunderstood," says Jetaime Thoo, business director at VaynerMedia APAC. "It’s about reallocating towards content that actually performs in-feed. Creators are simply better at producing native, culturally relevant content at scale."

"Thoo’s framing cuts to the heart of something brands consistently miss; the shift in spend toward creators is a change in the creative production model, and brands treating it as a straightforward media plan adjustment are burning budget. "Without the right operating model (volume, testing, iteration), creator spend becomes just another expensive line item with inconsistent returns," she adds.

The collapsed funnel and its limits

Live commerce is one of the clearest examples of what the industry has taken to calling the 'collapsed funnel': discovery, consideration, and conversion compressed into a single moment. Conversion rates from livestreams in Southeast Asia are two to three times higher than those from static product listings, and in markets like Thailand and China, where consumer behaviour is already conditioned to the format, the results are consistent.

Thoo’s argument is more structural than that, though. "Content is now the storefront," she says. "Every piece of content is effectively a point of entry into the buying journey."

Live accelerates the collapse because it combines entertainment, trust, urgency, and a transaction in a single moment, whereas short-form video and affiliate content do the same more slowly. The funnel is collapsing everywhere, and live commerce is simply the most visible example.

Christine Tan, APAC commerce lead at Publicis Groupe, points to a more immediate tension brands face once they’re in the format. Live commerce excels at driving quick wins, she explains, but the focus on short-term conversion can mean customer lifetime value gets overlooked.

"Brands don’t really get to see who their buyers are," Tan says. "You know the numbers, but not the faces or the stories behind them, which makes it tough to personalise your follow-up or create more targeted marketing down the road."

That data opacity is a limitation that the format has yet to resolve. The same mechanism that collapses the funnel also obscures the customer, the human being, sitting at the bottom of it.

Investment is growing and accountability is catching up

Both Thoo and Tan expect investment in live commerce to continue rising across APAC, but the conditions are changing. The experimentation phase is ending, and brands that stayed in the format are now expected to demonstrate returns, while those that could not adapt are already pulling back.

"Investment will continue to grow, but it will become more disciplined," says Thoo. "We’ll see a shift from experimentation to accountability, where brands will expect clear ROI."

Tan’s read is similar: brands are at a crossroads, working out what makes live commerce both profitable and sustainable. She flags AI-driven livestreams and affiliate partnerships as cost-efficiency plays likely to gain ground, as brands look for ways to stay in the format while managing the operational load.

The system, not the campaign

Both sources converge on the same structural diagnosis. The most common mistake in live commerce is treating it as a campaign rather than a capability, and the brands paying the price for that are visible across the region.

Thoo identifies content velocity as the critical and most underinvested variable, distinct from content volume. "High content velocity means you’re consistently putting out content, learning from what performs, and quickly feeding those insights back into the next wave," he explains. "It’s that feedback loop, not just output, that drives performance."

Tan’s version of the same argument centres on operating model discipline: a trained roster of hosts, a clear scripting and planning framework, and a layer of brand guidelines that holds up in the live environment. Without those foundations, she argues, live commerce becomes reactive, resulting in "a tactical rather than strategic approach" that burns spend without building anything durable.

The brands winning in this space are moving toward hybrid models that bring live, short-form video, and affiliate creators into a single, connected system, with organic content performance informing what gets scaled in live or paid formats. The pattern is already visible among Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing brands, where social-first strategies built on authentic creator engagement, affiliate marketing, and consistent content are the foundation, and traditional media is used to amplify rather than lead. That is a different infrastructure commitment from booking a tentpole livestream, because the format rewards consistency, whereas one-off events are becoming expensive noise.

Charlotte McEleny is our APAC and MENA columnist. Check out all her ExchangeWire features here.