Going digital has not made going regional frictionless for Southeast Asia’s smaller businesses. More than 80% of 700 micro, small and medium-sized enterprises surveyed across six ASEAN economies reported challenges in their cross-border e-commerce operations, according to a September report examining the barriers facing regional exporters.
The businesses surveyed were already selling internationally through e-commerce, so the findings reflect friction among active digital exporters rather than all ASEAN MSMEs. Marketplaces, payment providers, logistics companies and technology vendors face the same patchwork as they expand across countries with different rules, infrastructure and levels of platform access.
Market access still limits regional trade
The SCOPE Trade report draws partly on a 2024 Access Partnership survey of businesses in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Among respondents, 74% counted ASEAN among their top five e-commerce export markets, while 53% cited access to AI-enabled and other digital tools as a reason to sell abroad.
Marketplace access remains uneven despite that demand. Only 49% of transactional B2C marketplaces operating in ASEAN allow foreign sellers, which can leave exporters needing local entities or other arrangements that add cost and complexity.
Payments and trade infrastructure show similar fragmentation. Apple Pay’s Philippine rollout illustrated how bank participation, payment rails and merchant acceptance still vary by market, while a Singapore-Vietnam digital credentials pilot is testing ways to reduce manual checks in cross-border trade finance.
National regulation adds another layer. The Philippines’ central bank recently proposed tighter payment-operator rules covering merchant identification and transaction traceability, reinforcing the need for country-specific compliance planning even as regional infrastructure becomes more connected.
Training tops the list of support needs
A separate 2025 SCOPE Trade survey covered 20 business support organizations across nine ASEAN member states representing more than 220,000 direct member businesses. Market-led cross-border e-commerce training was selected by 95% as a way to increase MSME participation, while 75% selected peer-to-peer exchange and mentoring.
Greater use of existing ASEAN tools and more MSME-friendly domestic rules were each selected by 60%, compared with 45% for implementation of the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, or DEFA. Those percentages reflect the priorities of the 20 organizations surveyed, not ASEAN MSMEs as a whole.
DEFA negotiations concluded in May after ASEAN officials resolved the remaining issues. The agreement remains central to the region’s current economic agenda: at meetings in Manila on Sept. 20, ASEAN economic ministers and business leaders discussed digital integration and DEFA implementation alongside supply-chain and investment priorities.
ASEAN says successful implementation could help its digital economy reach as much as $2 trillion by 2030. Until regional rules translate into interoperable systems, companies expanding across Southeast Asia will still need to evaluate marketplace access, payments, logistics and regulatory requirements market by market.
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