For Fauzi Arif Hutama, who lives in the Indonesian city of Tangerang in Java, the holy month of Ramadan and celebrations for Eid al-Fitr are another excuse to check out deals on Shopee, the most popular e-commerce site in the country.

The 29-year-old electrician buys everything from clothing to food for his four pet cats on the Singapore-based Sea’s Shopee site. For Eid, which falls on April 10, he plans to spend his holiday bonus — equivalent to his monthly salary of 9 million rupiah ($566) — on snacks and refreshments for his relatives and neighbors and to also make charitable donations online. 

“I cannot remember the last time I bought something at a shopping mall,” he told Rest of World. “I do all my shopping online on Shopee.”

Hutama is not alone. Almost nine in 10 Muslim consumers in Indonesia will do some of their Ramdan shopping on Shopee, according to a recent survey by research firm YouGov. Lazada, Indonesia’s Tokopedia, and TikTok Shop are the other favored e-commerce sites, according to the survey, with shoppers saying they plan to buy more clothing, cosmetics, household appliances, and food and drinks online rather than offline and to make more charitable donations online.

The four e-commerce sites, dubbed the Four Horsemen by retail analysts, together control more than half of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market, valued at about $175 billion in all, market intelligence firm Cube Asia estimates. This high degree of concentration and consumers’ preference to shop on e-commerce and social media sites rather than on brand websites or Amazon — which has a limited presence in the region — set Southeast Asia apart from other markets, Simon Torring, co-founder of Cube Asia, told Rest of World. 

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“Consumers in this region all shop on the same four sites — sites that few outside the region have even heard of,” Torring said. “The only difference is that the shopping used to be largely intentional — that is, consumers went to the Shopee or Lazada app when they wanted to buy something. But with TikTok Shop’s entry, there has been a big disruption, and there’s more impulse buying now — they come to the app for entertainment, and the app drives them toward products.” 

The Southeast Asia region, made up of nearly a dozen countries, has a combined population of about 700 million and a gross domestic product of more than $3 billion. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and the tiny nation of Brunei, where Muslims make up more than half the population, Ramadan is a significant event in the e-commerce calendar, which is busy throughout the year with promotions and special offers.

Competition in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, is particularly fierce. Chinese tech giant Alibaba committed to investing more than $1.8 billion in Lazada last year, while ByteDance’s TikTok agreed to pay about $1.5 billion to buy most of Tokopedia from Indonesian tech conglomerate GoTo, to bolster its e-commerce business. The latter deal came after TikTok was forced to close its TikTok Shop for more than two months after Indonesian authorities banned shopping on social media platforms to protect small merchants and users’ data.

While Indonesia has adopted a stricter regulatory view on e-commerce, authorities across the region are trying to balance online and offline trade, weighing taxes for e-commerce sales, and debating whether to ban certain types of imports to protect homegrown businesses, Torring said. 

In Malaysia, which has a lighter regulatory touch, about a third of consumers shop through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.

“I think the options and the shopping experience are better on the local platforms.”

For example, Zurinna Raja Adam, a 44-year-old working mother of three, is shopping on e-commerce sites and social media platforms for the Eid celebration, known locally as Hari Raya. She favors Shopee and also checks out deals on Instagram, she told Rest of World, while her husband largely shops on Lazada. “I think the options and the shopping experience are better on the local platforms,” Adam said. “And I’m drawn to Shopee because it’s very accessible, and many well-known Malay artists appear on the livestreaming shows for products.” 

Like Adam, more shoppers in the region are drawn to this blend of entertainment and commerce, dubbed “shoppertainment,” with celebrities and influencers promoting brands via livestreaming and short-form videos. TikTok is the clear leader in this category.

“In Southeast Asia, consumers … expect brand and product content to be an integral part of content-driven video platforms, facilitating their shopping experience from browsing to buying,” reported a recent white paper from consulting firm Accenture and TikTok. 

The Southeast Asian market is following the lead of China, where millions of hosts sell everything from lipsticks to vacation homes via livestreaming and short-form videos.

While the fight in Southeast Asia was earlier between Shopee and Lazada, “a new battle is brewing between impulse-driven and intent-driven e-commerce platforms,” said Torring, with Shopee and Lazada beefing up their livestreaming to take on TikTok Shop’s growing share of the market.

Last year, TikTok Shop’s share of e-commerce sales in Southeast Asia grew to 7% from 2% a year earlier, while Shopee and Lazada remained at 26% and 12% respectively, and Tokopedia dipped, according to Cube Asia’s estimates.  

Nowhere is this battle more evident than in Indonesia, the biggest live-shopping market in Southeast Asia.

For Alfia Gitani, a 25-year-old housemaid in the city of Depok near Jakarta, who turns to TikTok for everything from celebrity gossip to Islamic teachings between chores, using the platform to shop is only natural. She also shops for beauty and fashion items on Shopee and Tokopedia but prefers TikTok Shop. That’s where she plans to spend her Eid festival bonus of 4 million rupiah ($251). “Compared to other marketplaces, TikTok is so much more convenient to browse and buy,” Gitani told Rest of World. “I’ll buy clothes for me and my brother, and maybe a handbag for my mom, and also some food. I’ll shop for everything on TikTok.”