If you run an online side hustle in Malaysia, sell on TikTok Shop, or just buy more from Shopee than you should, here's the backdrop you're operating in: Southeast Asia is poised to become the world's second fastest-growing e-commerce market by 2029, and the way Malaysians pay is being rewritten faster than the products on the shelves change.
Editor
Kai T chevron_right
Table of Contents
What the new IDC study says
A new independent study commissioned by 2C2P and Antom, two payments platforms now stitched into Ant International's stack, says regional e-commerce will compound at 13.2% a year between 2024 and 2029. The market will swell by 85.4% over that window and reach US$289.8 billion, putting Southeast Asia behind only India for growth pace.
The research, titled How Southeast Asia Buys and Pays 2026: Unlocking SMEs' Potential, was produced by analyst firm IDC. It points to small and medium enterprises as the primary engine of Malaysia's share of that growth, which tracks with what's visible at street level: more single-operator brands going from physical-only to online-first in a few months.
Digital payments are eating cash, faster than expected
The headline figure for anyone running a checkout: digital payment methods are projected to handle 97% of e-commerce transactions in Southeast Asia by 2029, up from 89% in 2024. That last 3% of cash-on-delivery and bank-transfer holdouts is shrinking quickly.
Where is the growth concentrated? Two buckets:
- Domestic payments, meaning real-time payment rails and local bank-based schemes. In Malaysia that means DuitNow QR, FPX, and the instant-transfer infrastructure Bank Negara has been pushing.
- Mobile wallets, particularly in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, but with Touch 'n Go eWallet, GrabPay, and Boost following a similar curve locally.
Why Malaysian SMEs should care
The study frames SMEs as the demographic with the most to gain and the most friction to lose. If you're a Malaysian merchant accepting only one or two payment methods, you're invisible to a chunk of regional buyers who default to wallets you don't list. Cross-border checkouts often fail because of currency conversion friction or rails that don't bridge into Malaysian banks.
2C2P's pitch is that consolidating local payment methods across the region (a single integration, multiple wallets, instant settlement) is the unlock for SMEs that want to sell across Southeast Asia without building a payments team. That's marketing, yes, but the underlying trend it's chasing, of fragmented local rails getting bundled into single APIs, is real.
The takeaway
The 13.2% growth number gets headlines, but the more useful one for Malaysian sellers is the 97% digital-payment share by 2029. That's a five-year deadline to accept the methods your customers actually use, or accept losing them. If your checkout doesn't show DuitNow QR, a major e-wallet, and at least one regional option, you're already behind the curve the study describes.