Seven claims about Indonesian online retail, and the definition each one depends on.
By: Robert Sterling – AsiaPresswire – Two research houses published Indonesia’s 2025 e-commerce figure within five months of each other, and the two numbers do not fit together. Momentum Works, the Singapore firm that tracks platform GMV across Southeast Asia, put the market at $57.7 billion, up 2.2%. e-Conomy SEA 2025, the annual Google-Temasek-Bain study, put Indonesian e-commerce at $71 billion, up 14%. The difference is $13.3 billion, and it is not a rounding error.
Both figures came from people who know the market. They diverge because they answer different questions. Momentum Works counts GMV on the marketplaces it tracks, which is a narrower object than it sounds: it excludes channels the firm does not model, and it is sensitive to how each platform books its own sales. e-Conomy runs a wider basket that now folds in video commerce. A trade ministry briefing on the same market cited $99 billion, without saying what that number covers.
That spread is ordinary in a market measured by consultancies rather than by a statistics agency. What is less ordinary is how rarely the spread is acknowledged. Most claims about Indonesia are claims about one of these numbers, and the number is usually left out of the sentence. Seven of those claims are worth testing.
Two growth rates, thirteen billion dollars apart
Here is the same market as six published measurements. The first four describe Indonesia. The last two describe the region, and they are included because they show how far the reporting can drift before anyone notices.
| Measure | Value | Scope | Published by |
| Indonesia platform GMV, 2025 | $57.7B, +2.2% | Marketplaces the firm tracks | Momentum Works |
| Indonesia e-commerce GMV, 2025 | $71B, +14% | Wider basket, includes video commerce | e-Conomy SEA 2025 |
| Indonesia digital economy GMV, 2025 | ~$100B, +14% | Six sectors, not only retail | e-Conomy SEA 2025 |
| Indonesia e-commerce, ministerial briefing | $99B | Not specified | Ministry of Trade |
| Southeast Asia platform GMV, 2025 | $157.6B, +22.8% | Regional total | Momentum Works, one outlet |
| Southeast Asia platform GMV, 2025 | ~$150B, +8% | Regional total | Same report, another outlet |
The two regional rows are the same report, covered by two outlets two days apart. One says GMV rose 8% to about $150 billion; the other says $157.6 billion, up 22.8%. The 2024 base, from the previous edition, was $128.4 billion. Eight per cent on that base is $138.7 billion. The $150 billion figure and the 8% figure cannot both be right, and neither reconciles with the 22.8% version.
None of this makes the reports worthless. It makes the headline growth rate the least stable number in them, because it is the one most sensitive to what got added to or removed from the base. A definition that absorbs a new category can post double-digit growth while the shops inside it post none.
DBS and the research firm Cube put Southeast Asian e-commerce sales at $184 billion in 2024, up from $4 billion in 2012. Momentum Works put platform GMV at $128.4 billion for the same year: two credible houses, one region, one year, a 43% gap. They are counting retail in a region where much of it happens off the platforms that get measured.
The $100 billion market that is not an e-commerce market
The most durable number in circulation is $100 billion, usually attached to the word e-commerce. It is not an e-commerce number. e-Conomy SEA 2025 puts Indonesia’s whole digital economy close to $100 billion in 2025, growing 14%, and that total spans ride-hailing and food delivery, travel, online media, digital financial services and retail. Retail is the largest slice at $71 billion, not the whole pie.
The ministry’s $99 billion is harder to pin down. In the briefing, the sentence runs roughly: e-commerce remains the largest contributor to the digital economy, which is expected to reach $99 billion. Read one way, e-commerce is $99 billion. Read another, the digital economy is, and e-commerce is merely its largest part. The ambiguity sits inside a single clause, and it has propagated into a great many decks.
Why does it matter? A $100 billion market and a $58 billion market support different investment cases. At $100 billion, Indonesia is roughly a third of Southeast Asia’s digital economy and a natural anchor tenant for regional logistics, cold chain and warehouse automation. At $58 billion, it is still the largest market in the region, but the density assumptions behind same-day delivery start to look early rather than overdue.
The same briefing that supplies the $99 billion also supplies a useful counterweight. Thirty-eight per cent of Indonesian consumers, according to the ministry’s reading of other work, now shop across online and offline channels in the same purchase journey. That is a fact about retail, and it does not care which GMV definition you prefer. It also explains why Blibli keeps opening electronics stores while its marketplace grows.
What 2.2% is actually measuring
Take the Momentum Works numbers seriously for a moment. For 2024 the firm gave Indonesia’s split as Shopee 46%, Tokopedia 23%, TikTok Shop 11%, Bukalapak 10%, Lazada 7% and Blibli 4% — a set that sums to 101 because of rounding. For 2025 the same firm gives Shopee 54% and Tokopedia plus TikTok Shop, counted together, 38%. Everything else, including Lazada and Blibli, shares 8%.
Hold the total fixed and those share movements imply growth. If the market grew 2.2% while Shopee’s share rose from 46% to 54%, Shopee’s own GMV rose by roughly 20%. Tokopedia and TikTok Shop, going from a combined 34% to 38%, rose by roughly 14%. The remaining platforms went from 21 points to 8, a fall of about 60%. The national rate of 2.2% is what remains after those three movements are netted against each other.
The largest single contributor to that subtraction is Bukalapak, which held 10% in 2024 and no longer sells physical goods. Remove a tenth of the base and a low single-digit national growth rate stops describing demand. It describes a change in the census.
Shopee’s own disclosures point the same way. Sea reported second-quarter 2025 GMV of $29.8 billion, up 28.2%, on 3.3 billion orders, up 28.6%, with e-commerce revenue of $3.8 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $227.7 million. Shopee’s own site puts 2025 group orders at 13.9 billion, up 27%. Those are global figures that include Brazil, so they are not an Indonesian growth rate. They are a check on the story that Southeast Asian demand stalled in 2025, and the check fails.
Share arithmetic has limits, and it is worth stating them. Percentages rounded to whole numbers, a set that sums to 101, and a denominator that moved between editions all introduce error. The direction of the result is robust; the precise 20% and 14% are illustrative. What is not illustrative is the size of the hole: ten points of base removed is five times the growth rate being reported.
Myth: the 2023 ban killed social commerce in Indonesia
On 27 September 2023 the trade ministry issued regulation 31/2023, which barred social media platforms from selling goods and from facilitating payments, and set a $100 minimum price for certain imported goods sold online. TikTok Shop Indonesia stopped processing transactions on 4 October at 17:00 local time. The coverage that followed described the end of an experiment.
The shutdown lasted 69 days. On 11 December 2023 TikTok agreed to pay $840 million for 75.01% of Tokopedia and to place its Indonesian shop inside that entity, with a total commitment of $1.5 billion. The shop reopened on 12 December. The regulation was never repealed. What changed was the corporate form around the product, not the product.
The aftermath is the part that gets dropped. e-Conomy SEA 2025 records 2.6 billion video-commerce transactions in Indonesia for 2025, up 90% year on year, with time spent watching shopping video up more than 400%. Regionally, the same study puts video commerce at a quarter of all e-commerce GMV in 2025, against under 5% in 2022. A format that was supposedly killed in 2023 now carries a quarter of the region’s e-commerce GMV.
The accurate version of the story is narrower and more useful: Indonesia made a foreign platform buy a local licence, and the platform paid. That is a statement about regulatory leverage. It is not a statement about whether people want to buy from videos, and the transaction counts answer that question fairly plainly.
One detail recurs often enough to be worth flagging. Before the ban, TikTok’s e-commerce head said the platform had served 80 million Indonesian users over two years, alongside millions of sellers. A served-user count, a buyer count and a market size are three different objects, and they routinely appear in the same sentence.
Four platforms, for about eighteen months
The four-platform story — Shopee, Tokopedia, Lazada, Bukalapak — was true for roughly one reporting cycle. In its 2024 Southeast Asia report, Momentum Works gave Indonesia’s 2023 as Shopee 40%, Tokopedia 30% and Bukalapak 11%. Lazada and TikTok Shop were not in the top three. A year later the firm’s 3.0 report produced the six-way split above, with TikTok Shop at 11% and Lazada at 7%.
By the 2025 numbers the top two names hold 92% between them. That is not a four-platform market, and it is barely a three-platform one. The concentration happened in about eighteen months, and it arrived through a merger rather than through competition in the ordinary sense: TikTok Shop’s Indonesian traffic was moved into Tokopedia’s legal entity, and the two share counts were subsequently published as one.
Lazada is the interesting casualty. Regionally it did $18 billion of GMV in 2024 and reported its first positive EBITDA, which is a real business. In Indonesia it holds 7%. Its Vietnamese position compressed faster: by 2025 Lazada and Tiki together held about 3% of that market, down from 6%, while Shopee took more than 56% and TikTok Shop more than 41%. The two leaders there accounted for 97% of platform GMV.
Blibli shows what survives at the edge. Third-quarter 2025 revenue was Rp5.64 trillion, up 32%, with nine-month revenue of Rp15.23 trillion, gross profit of Rp2.67 trillion and a take rate of 8.4%. It runs 236 electronics stores, 58 premium supermarkets and 38 home centres. That is a loss-narrowing omnichannel retailer with a marketplace attached, not a fourth pole of a platform war. The category still has specialists. It no longer has four generals.
Myth: growth is back above 20%
No published 2025 figure for Indonesia reaches 20%. Momentum Works says 2.2%. e-Conomy says 14% for e-commerce and 14% for the digital economy as a whole. The ministry’s briefing says 14%. The 20%-plus numbers that circulate are usually regional, usually from an earlier vintage, and usually attached to a different year.
The regional figures do not hold together either. One account of the 2025 Southeast Asia report gives 22.8% growth to $157.6 billion; another gives 8% to about $150 billion. The same report is said to show Thailand at 51.8% and Malaysia at 47.6%, with Indonesia at 2.2%. If those three country rates are right, an 8% regional rate requires Vietnam and the Philippines to have contracted sharply, and no published figure shows that.
The temptation is to average the lot and call it 15%. That would be a mistake, because the components are not drawn from one population. Thailand’s 51.8% is a platform rate on a much smaller base. Indonesia’s 2.2% is a platform rate distorted by a participant leaving. e-Conomy’s 14% is a wider basket. Averaging them produces a number with no referent.
What is genuinely growing fast is narrower than “the market”. Video-commerce transactions in Indonesia rose 90%. TikTok Shop’s global GMV went from $4.4 billion in 2022 to $16.3 billion, $33.2 billion and $64.3 billion in the three years after, then reached $50.3 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, up 92%. Its American GMV was $15.1 billion in 2025, up 68%, and the United States overtook Indonesia as its largest single market in the first half of 2026 at $11.8 billion. Blibli’s revenue rose 32%.
Those are all real growth stories. None of them is a statement about Indonesian aggregate demand, and two of the four are not about Indonesia at all.
Bukalapak left, and the national number moved
Bukalapak’s exit is usually told as a morality tale about local platforms. The sequence is less romantic. In 2023 the company lost Rp1.37 trillion. In the first half of 2024 its net loss widened 90% to Rp748 billion, and in the third quarter adjusted EBITDA was still negative at Rp68 billion. It had raised $1.5 billion in a 2021 listing, the largest in Indonesian history at the time.
In November 2024 it began closing business lines and cutting staff. In January 2025 it told users that orders would stop on 9 February, that unprocessed orders would be cancelled after 2 March, and that wallet balances could be withdrawn until 14 March. The remaining business sells mobile credit, data packages and bill payments. That is a real business. It is not e-commerce, and it is no longer counted as e-commerce.
The direction of causation matters. Read forward, the exit is evidence that a domestic platform with 11% of the market could not carry its cost base against better-capitalised rivals. Read backward, it is the single largest input into the 2.2% national growth rate: a tenth of the base disappeared, which is five times the reported growth. Both readings use the same facts. Only one of them is usually printed.
There is a lesson in the numbers, and it concerns operating costs rather than foreign competition. Bukalapak’s costs were large relative to the revenue its categories could produce. TikTok’s arrival made that worse. It did not create it.
A tax that has been postponed three times
In June 2025 the finance ministry issued PMK 37/2025, effective 14 July, requiring certified e-commerce platforms to withhold 0.5% of transaction value as prepaid income tax, with an exemption for sellers turning over less than Rp500 million a year, an e-invoice for every transaction, and remittance by the fifteenth of the following month. Four platforms were named as collection agents: Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada and Blibli.
It has not settled into force. Implementation slipped to February 2026, then to 1 August 2026, then to 1 November 2026. The finance minister pointed to second-quarter 2026 growth of 5.29% as insufficiently strong; the tax office framed the delay as protecting purchasing power. Shopee Indonesia stopped withholding on 6 August 2026 and said amounts already deducted would be refunded in full. The rule exists. The collection does not.
Border charges followed a different path. PMK 4/2025 took effect on 5 March 2025 and has been applied since. Goods valued between $3 and $1,500 now attract a flat 7.5% charge, with VAT still due, while eight categories — watches, cosmetics, steel, bags, textiles, footwear, bicycles and scientific books — sit at 0%, 15% or 25%. The old de minimis treatment is gone, and a 5% income tax applies to most of the listed categories. Sellers who import had their landed cost reset on schedule.
The pattern is worth naming: Indonesia moves quickly at the border and slowly inside the platform. It also retains the option of removal. In October 2024 the communications ministry blocked Temu and asked app stores to take it down, citing protection of small domestic producers. No delay procedure applies to a ban.
For a merchant, the practical ordering of regulatory risks runs in the opposite order to the one trade press usually implies. Withholding tax is a margin question that keeps being deferred. Import duty is a pricing question that already changed. Platform access is an existence question that has been exercised twice in three years.
Myth: live shopping is the engine
Three published figures describe the same phenomenon and do not describe the same thing. e-Conomy SEA 2024 put Southeast Asian live commerce above $5 billion in 2023 and projected $15 billion by 2025 at a 40% compound rate. Momentum Works’ 3.0 report put live commerce at $17.6 billion in 2024, 14% of platform GMV, with all video-led selling at 20%. e-Conomy SEA 2025 then put video commerce at a quarter of e-commerce GMV.
A category that was $5 billion in 2023 cannot be $17.6 billion in 2024 and a quarter of the regional market in 2025 without something other than growth occurring. The definitions widened from live streaming to video content to, presumably, anything discovered in a feed. Each widening is defensible on its own. Stacked end to end, they read as one trend line, which they are not.
TikTok’s American data suggests the livestream is not where the money moved. In the first half of 2026 the shop tab produced 51.4% of attributed GMV in the United States, up from 36% a year earlier. Short video fell from 50% to 40.4%, and live fell from 14% to 8.2%. The growth went into a searchable catalogue inside the app, which is a familiar retail mechanic wearing new clothes.
For a seller, that changes the work. Studio hours and host training matter less than catalogue depth, review volume and affiliate distribution. The live room is a promotion channel. The shop tab is the store, and the store is where the margin is.
What survives the corrections
Four things hold across every source. Indonesia is the largest e-commerce market in Southeast Asia by a wide margin, somewhere between $58 billion and $71 billion depending on definition. It is highly concentrated, with two platforms holding about 92% of platform GMV. The state sets landed cost at the border and can remove a platform outright. The fastest growth sits in content-driven discovery and in omnichannel retail, not in the aggregate.
The rest is bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is not a minor matter when capital allocation depends on it. A brand deciding whether to build a Jakarta warehouse is reading a growth rate. A fund underwriting a logistics startup is reading a take rate. A ministry defending a regulation is reading a contributor share. Each is looking at a different number from a different definition and calling it the Indonesian e-commerce market.
The discipline that helps is dull and effective. Ask which year, which scope and which firm. Ask whether the base changed between the two periods being compared. Ask whether the figure is GMV, revenue, or a share of something that was itself estimated. Most of the confusion in this market dissolves at the second question, because the base changes more often than the demand does.
Indonesia’s online retail is large, concentrated, heavily regulated at the border and lightly taxed inside the platform. Those four sentences have held for three years and will probably hold for three more. The growth rate has not, and treating it as the headline has cost a good deal of misplaced analysis.
Note: this piece was assigned the ranking format; eight comparable objects with verifiable figures could not be assembled, so it uses the myth-correction format instead.
Sources
- Momentum Works Indonesia 2025: GMV, growth, Shopee 54%, Tokopedia plus TikTok 38%: https://www.chwang.com/news/204507076900
- Ministry of Trade reading, $99 billion citation, 38% omnichannel: https://www.ebrun.com/ebrungo/zb/656876.shtml
- e-Conomy SEA 2025 Indonesia: $71 billion, 2.6 billion video transactions: https://id.mofcom.gov.cn/szjj/art/2025/art_2c227539667c4e13883c02073dbed02b.html
- e-Conomy SEA 2025 regional totals, video commerce at 25%: https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/zh-hans/companies-markets/south-east-asias-digital-economy-revenue-set-hit-us135-billion-2025-report?ref=article-sc
- Momentum Works 2024 shares 46/23/11/10/7/4, $128.4 billion base, $157.6 billion 2025: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%9C%E5%8D%97%E4%BA%9A%E7%94%B5%E5%95%86%E6%8A%A5%E5%91%8A/67641184
- Same report reported as 8% growth to about $150 billion: https://zxchuhai.com/202604/46444.html
- Momentum Works 2023 Indonesia shares 40/30/11: https://www.stcn.com/article/detail/1490069.html
- Momentum Works 2023 regional table, Shopee $55.1 billion: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1804727523439118318&wfr=spider&for=pc
- Sea second-quarter 2025 results: https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/sea-limited-reports-second-quarter-2025-results-2025-08-12
- Shopee 2025 group orders of 13.9 billion: https://shopee.cn/about
- TikTok’s $840 million for 75.01% of Tokopedia, $1.5 billion total: https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/tiktok-returns-to-indonesia-after-buying-majority-stake-in-local-e-commerce-platform
- TikTok Shop GMV by year, shop tab at 51.4%, live at 8.2%: https://www.jiemian.com/article/14969642.html
- TikTok Shop US GMV of $15.1 billion, Vietnam platform shares: https://kr-asia.com/tiktok-shop-narrows-the-gap-with-shopee-in-southeast-asias-e-commerce-market
- DBS and Cube estimate of $184 billion for 2024: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1841148185145178527&wfr=spider&for=pc
- Blibli third-quarter 2025 revenue, take rate, store counts: https://www.bricsgo.com/zh_cn/flash/79161
- Bukalapak shutdown dates, losses, Temu block: https://www.stcn.com/article/detail/1490069.html
- PMK 37/2025 terms, 0.5% rate, Rp500 million threshold: https://www.chinatax.gov.cn/chinatax/c102743/c5243365/content.html
- Three postponements to 1 November 2026: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1872825939025001855&wfr=spider&for=pc
- PMK 4/2025 flat 7.5% charge on goods worth $3 to $1,500: https://swt.sc.gov.cn/sccom/c25030603/2025/3/31/0b3aa552049a468197dafd811948aab9.shtml
- PMK 4/2025 effective date and VAT treatment: https://www.ccpitgx.org/webcpitgx/2025/gjll_0311/14812.html