Shopee’s Executive Director, Brand and Growth Marketing Peggy Zhu spoke to Charlotte Mceleny about the rise of creator commerce…

As Shopee extends its affiliate programme to Instagram and rivals TikTok Shop and YouTube pour investment into video commerce, Peggy Zhu, executive director, brand growth and marketing at Shopee, argues that the brands winning in creator commerce are the ones treating it as a strategy, rather than a run of one-off posts.

Creator commerce in Southeast Asia has moved past the experimental phase. What began as influencers tagging the occasional product has become core plumbing for how the region shops. Indonesia alone is home to almost 12 million content creators, the most of any market in the region, according to GroupM’s 'State of the Creator Economy' report. The same report puts creator-led commerce across Asia-Pacific growth markets at USD$100bn (£74.9bn) in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2025, up from USD$24bn (£17.9bn) two years earlier. Every major platform is now building for the audiences they command.

A mature market

Shopee and Meta's latest move is a marker of that maturity. On 30 June, the two companies extended Shopee's affiliate partnerships to Instagram across Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Brazil, letting eligible creators add Shopee products to reels and feed content and earn commission when viewers complete qualifying purchases. It builds on the Facebook affiliate partnerships launched in 2025, which by March 2026 had signed up more than 5 million creators globally, around half of them new to Shopee's affiliate programme.

Shopee and Meta are far from the only ones pushing here. TikTok Shop's GMV in Southeast Asia reached USD$45.6bn (£00) in 2025, roughly ten times its level three years earlier, according to figures compiled by Digital in Asia. Google spent July rolling out video commerce tools for YouTube across the region, several of them piloted with Shopee, after its own figures showed video commerce growing fivefold between 2022 and 2025 to account for a quarter of Southeast Asia's e-commerce GMV.

The infrastructure question has, therefore, largely been answered, but the one facing brands now is how to use it well. For Peggy Zhu, executive director, brand, and growth marketing at Shopee, the change is one of role. Content has become the thing that gives shoppers the confidence to buy.

"Southeast Asia is a very mobile-first region, where consumers are highly engaged with digital content and social platforms. At the same time, shoppers on Shopee often come with clear purchase intent. What has evolved is that content now plays a bigger role in helping shoppers understand products, see how they are used, and gain confidence before buying," Zhu says.

Scale makes the difference in SEA

Shopee has been building towards this for years, launching Shopee Live in 2019 and Shopee Video in 2022 to bring short-form content and discovery into the app. The results now show up in the order data. In the first quarter of 2026, orders from livestreaming and short-form video grew more than 50% year on year and made up more than a quarter of total physical goods orders in Southeast Asia.

That scale changes what good looks like for the brands buying into it. Zhu's advice to marketers is to stop treating creator work as a series of transactions.

"Creator commerce works best when the recommendation feels natural, useful, and trusted. Consumers can tell when content feels forced, so the strongest partnerships are those where there is a clear fit between the creator, the product, and the audience," she explains.

"For brands, my advice would be to think beyond one-off creator posts. Creator commerce should be part of a broader strategy to help consumers discover, understand, and feel more confident about products. Giving creators the flexibility to communicate in their own style is also important, because they know what resonates best with their audiences," Zhu adds.

It is a familiar lesson from earlier phases of influencer marketing, now applied to a channel that converts straight to sale. 

Lots of players

Another feature of a mature market is that no single platform owns it. Shopee runs its own content channels and also works with Meta and, through Google's video commerce pilots, YouTube, meeting shoppers wherever they already spend their attention.

"Platform partnerships help Shopee make the journey from discovery to purchase more seamless. Working with partners like Meta allows us to extend this experience to social platforms, where shoppers are already engaging with creators and content," Zhu says.

Growth brings its own problems, and the two Zhu names are trust and scale. "Trust is one of the key challenges. As creator commerce grows, recommendations must remain authentic, transparent, and useful to shoppers. The goal should not be to create more content for the sake of it, but to enable better content that helps consumers make informed purchase decisions," she notes.

Scale is the second problem as creators need tools to find products and build viable income, while sellers need simple ways to run and measure partnerships. Shopee's answer runs through its affiliate programme and marketing solutions, with AI-enabled recommendation tools matching the right products, creators, and audiences.

Where this goes next, in Zhu's view, is towards something more joined up. "Looking ahead, we believe the greatest opportunities will come from a more connected creator-commerce ecosystem, where creators, platforms, marketplaces, and brands work together to make shopping more seamless and rewarding for everyone involved. That is what we are focused on at Shopee as we build the next phase of content commerce," she says.

The plumbing is largely in place for the ecosystem to grow. However, the brands that win the next phase will be the ones treating creator commerce as a strategy to be built, rather than a post to be bought.