Shopee vs Lazada vs TikTok Shop in Malaysia: which should you sell on first?

It's the first question almost every Malaysian brand asks us: "Should I be on Shopee, Lazada, or TikTok Shop?" Usually said as if one of them is simply the right answer and the others are wrong. They're not. These three aren't three versions of the same shop — they're three different buying situations. Picking well is less about which platform is "best" and more about which one matches how your customer already shops.

The three platforms at a glance

Before the nuance, here's the honest one-line version of each — the buyer's mindset, how they discover you, and who each one suits:

Notice the second column. On Shopee and Lazada the buyer arrives with intent — they're already looking. On TikTok Shop, demand is created in the feed by content the buyer didn't ask for. That single difference drives almost everything else about how you win on each — and it's easiest to see on a single axis:

Who actually wins on traffic?

If the question is raw reach, Shopee has been the largest e-commerce destination in Malaysia for years — the default place people go when they know what they want and want to compare price and reviews. That's a huge, dependable pool of search-led demand. Lazada, by contrast, is the smaller of the three today — and the one that's been losing ground: its share of the market has slid over recent years while the other two have grown. What Lazada keeps, though, is a loyal, stable base of brand- and quality-conscious buyers who still turn to it for categories where trust and authenticity matter — a smaller pool, but a dependable one.

TikTok Shop is the newcomer that changed the shape of the market. Its growth has been the fastest of the three by a wide margin — its Malaysian sales surged through 2025 — and it did something the marketplaces structurally can't: it turned entertainment into a storefront. People don't open TikTok to shop — they open it to be entertained, and buy along the way. That makes it extraordinary for discovery and impulse, and less suited to products nobody can make interesting in eight seconds of video.

Who wins on margin and control?

Every marketplace charges you to be there — commission, transaction fees, and the near-mandatory campaign and ad spend that keeps you visible. The exact rates differ by platform and category and change over time, so we won't quote figures that'll be stale next quarter (we break the fee stack down separately in what selling on Shopee & TikTok Shop really costs). The strategic point is this: a marketplace rents you its audience. You get instant access to millions of buyers, but you're a tenant — the platform owns the customer relationship, the data, and the rules.

That trade-off shifts by platform. Lazada's LazMall and branded stores give more room to present a premium, controlled brand experience. Shopee rewards competitiveness and campaign participation. TikTok Shop rewards content and creators above almost everything else — your best "salesperson" might be an affiliate you've never met. None of these is inherently better; they simply ask for different strengths.

The real first step isn't choosing a platform

Here's where we'd gently push back on how the question is usually asked. For a brand that's serious about building something, "which platform?" is one of the last decisions — not the first. Before it comes the harder, unglamorous work: what kind of brand are you, who exactly is your customer, and what niche do you actually own? Get that wrong and no platform will rescue you. Get it right and the platform very nearly picks itself.

From the founder

For a brand that wants to do this properly, the platform isn't where I'd start. First lock down your brand type, your positioning, your customer and your niche. Then do the market research — and you don't need to pay for tools to do it.

Study the brands and products like yours, and the related products they sell. Estimate your ceiling for free: open the marketplace, search your keywords, and read competitors' total and monthly units sold — that alone tells you how big the market really is. Then check the Malaysian search trend for those keywords in a keyword tool. Only once your positioning and audience are settled should you pick a channel. Put a high-ticket product on a price-led platform first, and the early results will disappoint — every time.

— Louis Teo, Founder of Hansen

So — with positioning settled — which should you start with?

Now the platform question has a real answer. Forget "best" and ask a sharper one: where is my buyer already, and can I compete the way that platform rewards? A simple way to decide:

• Do people already search for your product? (supplements, home goods, parts, everyday essentials) → Shopee first. The demand exists; you just need to be findable and convert.
• Is your product branded, considered, or higher-ticket, where trust and authenticity close the sale? → Lazada deserves serious weight, often alongside Shopee.
• Is your product visual, demo-able, or impulse-friendly, and can you (or creators) produce short video consistently? → TikTok Shop first. Content is the entire engine — no content, no sales.

Do you have to pick just one — forever?

Not necessarily — you can run several from day one. The mistake isn't having multiple platforms; it's operating all of them at half-effort. What matters is focused, strategic operation: with your positioning and audience settled, put your weight behind cracking one platform first. A real result on one channel does two things — it lifts your numbers on the others, and it gives you the confidence to keep going for the long haul.

We're not against running Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop in parallel — a brand present on all three captures the searcher, the brand-conscious buyer and the impulse scroller, and stops depending on any single algorithm to survive. The one condition: expand only as fast as your people and resources can genuinely support. Multi-platform is a resourcing decision as much as a marketing one.

The cost most sellers forget to count

Whichever platform you land on, there's one expense that quietly dwarfs the platform's fees — and almost nobody puts it on the books.

From the founder

The most expensive mistake I see — new brand or established — is wanting to do everything yourself to keep all the profit. Labour and trial-and-error are the costliest things there are. You train the people, you make the mistakes, you lose the time — and sometimes you miss the selling window completely.

Think of a garden. Trimming it yourself costs your whole afternoon and maybe a cut hand or a fall; a gardener just gets it done. Servicing your own car costs more in time and mistakes than the workshop that does it every day. Your time is a cost too — most sellers simply never put a price on it. That's the whole reason a service like ours exists.

— Louis Teo, Founder of Hansen