Rising Fees Have Changed What an Ecommerce Enabler Is For
The industry press just named the shift every marketplace brand is feeling: fees are up, and the goal has moved from GMV to profitable GMV. Here's the operator's take on what that actually changes.
The Business Times ran a piece this month — “Rising fees are changing the role of South-east Asia's e-commerce enablers” — that put an industry name to something every marketplace brand has felt in its margins for the past two years. It's worth reading. It also, from where we sit as operators, only tells half the story.
Here's the half it gets exactly right.
The diagnosis: fees are up, and the goal has changed
Marketplace commissions have risen across Southeast Asia. Per a Momentum Works report cited in the article, Shopee's regional take rate reached around 13.5% in Q4 2025 — and that's before advertising, logistics, returns, affiliate commissions, and campaign incentives. Stack those together and total marketplace costs for a well-run store now routinely exceed 30% of GMV.
When a third of your top line disappears before product cost, chasing raw sales volume stops making sense. As aCommerce's Paul Srivorakul put it in the piece, the question has moved to how you “grow profitable GMV.” Basic store management — uploading listings, running standard campaigns — has become, in Intrepid's words, a baseline commodity. The value has moved to whatever protects the profit under the GMV.
If this sounds familiar, it's the same shift we wrote about in paying growth prices for maintenance work — when platform fees rise and every other channel cost is fixed, the one lever you control is what you pay your enabler, and what you're really buying is margin protection, not more activity.
Two answers to the same problem
Where the article and the operator's view part ways is on what to do about it. The big regional enablers have answered the margin squeeze by building more: analytics suites, performance-marketing arms, fulfilment networks, and livestream studios at scale — Intrepid runs around 100 live-commerce studios, aCommerce about 20, AnyMind 85 across Asia-Pacific. And it's working for them commercially; several report revenue doubling or first-time profitability.
That's the enterprise answer, and for a large multinational with the volume to fill 100 studios, it's a reasonable one. But look at what the brands in the same article actually did when their own margins tightened. Twinings and Ovaltine didn't buy more enabler services — they cut. Fewer livestreams. Promotions that didn't obviously return, dropped. Affiliate commissions, tightened. They kept fulfilment (expensive to build in-house) and evaluated everything else on measurable outcomes.
“Grow profitable GMV.”Paul Srivorakul, aCommerce — via The Business Times
That instinct — keep what returns, cut what doesn't, judge every line on margin — is the whole job now. And it is not, for most brands, solved by hiring a bigger enabler with more studios. It's solved by an operator lean enough to run the store profitably and honest enough to tell you which of your spend to kill.
What “profitable GMV” actually requires
Strip away the studio counts and the shift comes down to a handful of operating disciplines. None of them are new to a hands-on operator; all of them are what brands are now, finally, paying for.
| Discipline | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Channel roles | Every channel gets a defined job — awareness, volume, or profit — and a budget matched to it. You can't treat them all the same any more. |
| Promotion discipline | If a product only sells on discount, the problem is the product, not the promo budget. Cut promotions that buy unprofitable volume. |
| Ad efficiency | Ads judged on return, not spend. Scale only behind listings and keywords that are already profitable. See marketplace ads management. |
| Margin-aware pricing | Pricing and bundles set to protect contribution after fees — not to win a race to the bottom against your own category. |
| Live commerce, rationed | Not streaming daily for the sake of it — concentrating live on the peak moments (mega-sales, payday) where it actually converts. |
Notice what these have in common: they're all decisions to not spend somewhere. That's the part a tool or a template can't do for you, and it's the part we wrote about in why “AI-powered” agencies miss the point — the value isn't the studio or the software, it's the judgment about where the money shouldn't go.
Don't leave the marketplace — reduce your dependence on it
The fee pressure has some sellers eyeing the exit; in Vietnam, merchant counts on the major platforms reportedly fell around 7% in 2025. But as Power Commerce's Hadi Kuncoro noted in the article, you can't really boycott marketplaces — they've become consumer behaviour. Building your own channels (a DTC site, offline stores, dedicated social teams) usually costs more than the fees you'd escape.
The right move isn't exit — it's reducing overdependence. Give the marketplace its proper role as your conversion engine, run it lean and profitable, and let other channels do the jobs they're better at. Social commerce is now roughly a fifth of the region's GMV, so it earns a place in the mix — but as a channel with a defined goal, not a reflex.
The reframe: rising fees didn't make the enabler less useful. They made the commodity parts less valuable and the judgment parts essential. The enabler you want now is the one accountable for your profit, not your activity.
Where this leaves your brand
If you're a large multinational selling everywhere at once, an enterprise enabler with the full studio-and-suite stack may genuinely fit. But if you're a growth-stage or mid-sized brand watching a third of your GMV vanish into fees, the answer to margin pressure is rarely a bigger enabler. It's a leaner, sharper operator who runs your Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop stores profitably, tells you honestly what to stop paying for, and grows when your margin grows — not just your GMV.
That's the model we've run since 2019, and it's the one the whole industry is now, belatedly, being priced into. If you want to see how it applies to your stores, read the deeper piece on pricing your enabler to the phase you're in, or compare the main enablers honestly.