Shopee and Lazada Ads for Cross-Border Sellers in South East Asia

Delivery time sets your ceiling: A cross-border listing shipping out of Australia into Indonesia or the Philippines carries a delivery estimate of roughly seven to fourteen days against a locally stocked competitor's two to three. On the same keyword at the same bid, that listing converts at about a third of the local rate. No bidding strategy recovers the difference. So the first work is not the ad account. It is deciding whether the category survives that estimate, or whether you need stock inside the market before you spend anything at all. Where the numbers do work, we screen markets one at a time. Singapore and Malaysia forgive cross-border shipping and pay for it in average order value. The Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia are cash-on-delivery heavy, and a return-to-origin rate in the twenties turns a profitable ad account into a loss carried in freight. We look at your RTO before we look at your return on spend, and on two engagements the recommendation was to fix checkout and postpone media by a quarter. Running the accounts: Shopee Search Ads carry the intent and are structured against your own product tiers. Hero items take manual bids and keyword control; tail items go to automatic placements, where the platform's data is better than ours and we say so. Discovery placements are treated as a merchandising channel rather than a search channel, and judged on new-buyer share instead of blended return. Lazada's Sponsored Search, Sponsored Discovery and Sponsored Affiliate each behave differently on a LazMall storefront than on a marketplace listing, and we set them up as three separate decisions rather than one budget split three ways. The platform metrics that gate placement get managed as media work, because that is what they are. Chat response time, shop rating, late shipment rate and participation in the free shipping programme all affect what your listings are eligible for. An account can lose to a seller bidding less, purely because their operational score is better. The campaign calendar is the plan: The double-date campaigns are where the volume sits, and also where traffic cost multiplies inside a window in which everyone is discounting. Registration and voucher deadlines fall weeks ahead of the sale date, so the decision is made long before the day. Which two or three dates you fund properly, and which ones you sit out with stock held back, is the whole plan, and it is made against landed cost rather than last year's gross merchandise value. What is not included: We do not write your listings in Bahasa, Thai or Vietnamese, and we do not accept machine translation. Local-language copy comes from a native speaker on your side, or a translator we can name for you. We specify what each field needs and we review the result. We do not manage seller support disputes, warehouse selection or your third-party logistics contracts, though we will say plainly when those are why the advertising is not working. Who this suits and who it does not: It suits sellers with regional stock, or a funded plan to hold it, and categories where the brand name already means something in the market. It does not suit anyone testing whether South East Asia is worth entering; that question is answered by a market study and a small stock commitment, not by an ad budget. We will not open six markets at once, whatever the budget looks like.