Why Thai Consumer Brands Are Building Their Own Stores Next to Shopee and Lazada

ByBNW TEAM

For most consumer brands in Thailand, online sales start on the marketplaces. Shopee and Lazada bring ready-made traffic, payments and logistics, and for a new brand that is hard to beat. But as a brand grows, the same platforms start to look less like a launchpad and more like a landlord. Fees rise with volume, the platform controls the customer data, and every promotion competes with thousands of other sellers on the same screen.

That is why a growing number of Thai brands now run their own online store, often on Shopify, alongside their marketplace shops. The aim is not to leave the marketplaces. It is to own at least one channel where the brand sets the terms.

What an owned store actually changes

Selling through your own store changes three things that matter to a finance director.

First, margin. Marketplace fees, payment charges and promotional costs come off every order. On your own store the main variable cost is how you acquire the visitor.

Second, customer data. On a marketplace, the buyer belongs to the platform. On your own store you get the email address, the purchase history and the permission to market again. Repeat customers are far cheaper to reach than new ones.

Third, pricing control. A brand’s own store can hold its price and position while marketplace listings fight through flash sales.

The traffic problem

The catch is that an own store starts with no traffic. Paid ads can fill the gap, but paid traffic stops the moment the budget does, and costs tend to rise as more brands bid for the same customers. That is where search comes in.

Google is by far the dominant search engine in Thailand, with about 99.5% of the search market according to StatCounter’s July 2026 figures. Shoppers who search for a product type, a comparison or a buying guide on Google are often ready to buy. If the brand’s own store ranks for those searches, it earns traffic that does not need a new payment every month.

Why Shopify stores often fail to rank

Shopify is a solid platform for search, but stores often hold themselves back in predictable ways:

  1. Thin collection pages. Category pages with a heading and a grid of products, and no useful text, rarely rank.

  2. Duplicate variants. Colours and sizes can create many near-identical URLs, which splits ranking signals.

  3. Heavy themes. Each installed app can add scripts that slow the store on mobile.

  4. A single language. Brands selling to Thai and English-speaking customers often publish in one language, or rely on automatic translation.

Fixing these is less about writing more blog posts and more about getting the store’s structure right first. Specialists in Shopify SEO in Thailand usually start with a technical audit for exactly this reason.

Run it like a sales channel

The brands that get value from an owned store treat organic search as an ongoing sales channel with its own budget and targets, not a one-off website project. They track revenue from organic visitors separately from paid and marketplace revenue, and they judge the work by that number.

Marketplaces will remain a large part of Thai e-commerce. The question for a growing brand is whether all of its online sales should depend on someone else’s platform. An owned store that ranks on Google is the most direct way to answer no.