Ecommerce Nation: the picture I believe in

At ShopX 2025, two numbers shared in the room stuck with me more than anything else:

Half of all Shopify dropshippers above the 1 million USD mark are operating from Southeast Asia.

4 of the 5 most-installed apps on the Shopify App Store are built by Vietnamese.

These aren’t forecasts. They’re already true.

What I want to talk about is the picture that will form from these numbers.

Vietnam has 2 layers. One is missing.

After years in this industry watching China win big in global ecommerce, I think they won because they owned 3 strategic layers:

Layer 1 — Manufacturing. China built the “world’s factory” over 30 years.

Layer 2 — Tools and infrastructure. Alibaba.com, Accio Work, CapCut, generative AI tools for sellers — China built them itself.

Layer 3 — Brands. Shein, Anker, Tonal…

Vietnam already has Layer 1 in good shape. Layer 3 is starting to appear — Emmie by Happy Skin, E-Herb, VINUT, Newbam, and a list that grows every quarter. Layer 2 is the gap.

Who will build Layer 2 for Vietnam? I see 3 options.

1. Borrow Layer 2 from the US — Klaviyo, Triple Whale, Postscript. Good quality, but expensive, and most don’t understand the APAC market.
2. Borrow Layer 2 from China — cheap and full-featured, but it comes with dependency and a stack of risks.
3. Vietnam builds Layer 2 itself — slower than either of the above, but it brings sovereignty, deep understanding of APAC verticals, and every dollar earned stays in Vietnam.

I’m choosing the third path. That’s why GemPages spent 10 years not pivoting and not raising outside capital. We want to stand as a tool of Vietnam, not as a distributor for tools and infrastructure from another country.

The funnel no one has captured

A global DTC brand with 1 million USD a month in revenue typically spends 500,000–600,000 USD a month on ads, building the familiar sales funnel: ads → landing page → checkout → email → repeat purchase.

In other words, this is the billion-dollar funnel every global brand must travel through.

Vietnamese brands today are doing well on the upstream — sourcing, packaging, shipping.

The downstream — conversion optimization, funnel flow, retention infrastructure — still relies largely on tools from overseas.

That means every month, a meaningful chunk of Vietnamese brand revenue flows back to the US through monthly tool subscriptions they have to use. I don’t have an exact number for this ratio, but anyone running DTC knows: the tool stack for a brand at scale is not small.

That’s the opportunity. Build Layer 2 — CRO infrastructure, AI agents, performance tooling — by Vietnam, for Vietnam and APAC.

The point of this isn’t to compete head-on with American competitors in the US market. It’s first to give Vietnamese brands tools that understand Vietnamese users’ problems, and to keep Vietnamese money inside Vietnam.

I don’t think Vietnam will win the global landing page builder race in 5 years. The question I care about more: can Vietnam win the CRO infrastructure for APAC brands going global niche?

The 4S Strategy — and why Gem runs ShopX

The 4S Strategy is short for four cities: Shenzhen, Saigon, Singapore, and Sydney. Shenzhen is where products are manufactured, Saigon is where things get built and run, Singapore is where capital and bridges happen, and Sydney is the gateway to a mature DTC market.

A Vietnamese brand going global needs to touch all four — sourcing, building, raising, selling. It’s hard for one founder to fly all four cities. It’s easier if there’s a community stretched along the corridor.

That’s why ShopX launched in April 2025 in Hanoi. Over 200 people sat in one ballroom — including 50+ Shopify Plus operators across APAC, 100+ partners, agencies, app builders, and 20+ speakers from 6 countries.

As far as I know, this was the first global-scale ecommerce-enabler event hosted in Vietnam.

More importantly, ShopX 2025 gave me a critical data point — the ballroom held. 200 people flew in from 6 countries, stayed until late, and the Shenzhen-Saigon-Sydney group chat is still active weeks after the event ended.

That’s evidence for something bigger: the APAC ecommerce community needs an operating hub, and Vietnam can be it.

Where will this picture go?

10 years ago, no one thought Vietnam could have 400,000 global sellers. 5 years ago, no one thought TikTok Shop Vietnam’s fashion vertical alone could pass 900 million USD in a single quarter.

Even today, not many GemPages customers know we’re from Vietnam.

The picture is forming faster than predicted.

I have real conviction in this picture, and I’m looking forward to GemCommerce’s next 10 years.

An invitation

Made in Vietnam has had its 30 years. Designed in Vietnam is taking shape. The next 5 years will be Sold from Vietnam to the world.

That’s what I want ShopX and Ecommerce Nation to exist to work on.

If you’re building a Vietnamese DTC brand going global, or thinking about it, ShopX 2026 dates will go up on this site and through the email list.

Or grab a coffee in Saigon. That works too.

— Chris