This is the full recording transcript, lightly cleaned for readability. It includes live audience Q&A and a time-limited offer that was specific to attendees of this session — pricing and availability from the recording should not be treated as current; contact us for up-to-date options.

Thanks. Thank you, NG — I think NG is doing health programme consultations, interested in Indonesia, and May Ping is doing handcrafted self-care jewellery and interested in going into the US market. Thank you so much for sharing what you’re currently working on and which market you want to go into. This is a collaborative webinar with the Chamom community and G.O.L Solutions, and in this session I’ll be sharing three ways to skip traditional importers and enter new markets for online consumer brands.

If you’re working on consumer physical products going into these markets, these are the strategies a lot of popular consumer brands are using right now. To get the most out of the session, participate actively in the chat, take notes, and try to remove distractions — it’s fairly knowledge-heavy.

The reason we decided to run this webinar now is that the most popular social platforms — YouTube, Meta, TikTok — are starting to let users add affiliate links directly on their content. TikTok Shop is the obvious one, especially in Southeast Asia, but Meta and YouTube are also opening this up. That’s a real opportunity, because your overseas marketing cost has dropped significantly. Previously you’d need a huge campaign — TV, billboards, offline activations — to enter a market where nobody knows who you are. Now, piggybacking on these platforms’ distribution, all you need to figure out is how to physically get your product into the market. That’s what today is about — the setup that million-dollar consumer brands use to enter Southeast Asia. Some of this also applies outside the region, including the US; happy to go deeper on that after the session if useful.

My mission is to help entrepreneurs fulfil their global ambitions through online strategy. This webinar is designed for people who already have some overseas demand — customers travelling home with your product, or the occasional international order — who already run online channels locally (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Lazada, Shopee), who’ve maybe tried international shipping one item at a time and found the cost punishing, or who’ve looked into finding a local distributor and found it expensive and slow with no guaranteed outcome. If any of that describes you, this is for you.

What makes this training different is that it covers four things: how to skip finding local distributors, how to keep marketing control instead of relying on someone else, how to cut market-entry time from an average of five years down to six months, and how to start selling cross-border without a website. Stay to the end and you’ll get a free market entry scorecard that helps you rank different target markets and decide which is right for you and in what order.

Before getting into it, a bit about me. My name is Tam. I’m a serial entrepreneur who’s founded and run about six businesses, two of them serving international customers, over the past decade or so. My first venture, when I was ten, was an online aquarium store in Vietnam — people could order fish and tank equipment. We started getting orders from outside our city, and eventually from overseas — including one particular order from Germany, where we literally packed two fish and shipped them. That experience showed me that online channels let you reach people well beyond where you physically are, and social media has made that dramatically easier since. That’s why I’m passionate about helping people go global.

I also run a podcast, originally called Vietnam Rising and now called Kậm Tâm — “builder by heart” in Vietnamese — with an audience across more than 65 countries, and I’m a logistics commentator on Southeast Asia and the US, featured on BBC News and Channel NewsAsia among others.

I want to tell the story of how my own family’s business first tried to grow overseas about ten years ago, so you don’t have to repeat our mistakes. We were distributing logistics-technology software and products from Vietnam and started looking at Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, we found a distributor — someone we’d worked with on other ventures, so there was an easy trust factor — but it took three years just to convince them to come on board, and even then there was a values misalignment with what we were now trying to sell, and it never really got traction.

We then looked at Singapore and found a great partner — still one of our biggest partners a decade later — but it took five years to land that relationship, because it was a large corporate with many internal stakeholders. We didn’t get to choose the timing; it happened when it was right for them, not for us. The takeaway: finding a local distributor is a genuinely big bet that can take three, five, or more years. The other lesson is that you shouldn’t treat overseas expansion as something you need to survive — establish your business at home first, then branch out.

So that’s the story behind why I care about this. But today isn’t about me, it’s about you, and about not taking three to five years to get started. Here’s the question: what if you don’t need a local distributor to enter a new market at all? Nobody can stop you from selling cross-border yourself in three to six months. That’s the advantage of online channels — the space is yours, and the results are a function of your own effort, not someone else’s permission or timeline.

Here are the three secrets we’ll go through: one, you don’t need an importer to bring products in; two, how to skip waiting years and missing the opportunity; three, you don’t need a website to go international.

Secret one: you don’t need an importer to bring products in. In a traditional import/export setup there’s an exporter (you, the brand owner) and an importer/licence holder on the receiving side — typically a distributor or buyer who agrees to sell into that market. In the cross-border e-commerce setup, you’re still the exporter, but for the importer and licence-holder role — which you can’t skip legally — you now have two options instead of one. You can set up your own local entity in each market, or you can use a third-party Importer on Record (IOR) who acts as your importer and licence holder on paper, handling admin, customs clearance and paperwork, while you keep full control of distribution and marketing.

Comparing the two setups: in the traditional model it typically takes three to five years before you can start selling, marketing is largely in the distributor’s hands, and your success depends on how good that distributor turns out to be — not guaranteed. In the new model, you can start selling immediately, marketing stays with you since everything is done virtually, and because you’re the one putting in the effort and you know your own product best, the outcome is much more within your control.

A couple of case studies. Swisse — does anyone know it? A very popular supplement brand, originally homegrown in Australia, later acquired by a Hong Kong group. Before they were the brand they are today, they already had solid Australian retail distribution — pharmacies, retail stores. They noticed some stores had unusually high revenue, and traced it to Chinese international students buying up stock to send home to China. That told them there was real demand in China even though they hadn’t entered it. People warned them China was “a black box” that required a local partner and that Western marketing wouldn’t translate. Instead, knowing Chinese consumers were already comfortable buying online through platforms like Alibaba, they partnered with an e-commerce platform directly and built their China presence online, without ever going through a traditional local distributor.

Second case study: Xiaomi. In 2014, Xiaomi began international expansion in Singapore and India. Their first batch of 10,000 phones sold out in two seconds in India with zero retail presence, and 500,000 people ended up on a waitlist. It wasn’t until 2017 — three years later, once they were already selling 100,000 phones a week — that they opened their first physical outlet alongside a local e-commerce store. They skipped distributors entirely and went direct to consumer before retailers even believed in them; their first retail store was put in the basement because the retailer didn’t expect anyone to show up — ten thousand people did, on opening day. Using what they called a “slow and small” strategy, testing markets before committing to big retail investment, Xiaomi launched in 70 countries within three years and became the number-one phone brand in India. International expansion can be as fast and efficient as a good website and a community of genuine fans — even though these two examples are brands now making millions or billions a year, the same underlying mechanics apply at smaller scale, and I’ll share some of those client stories shortly.

Secret two: how to skip waiting years and missing the opportunity. For regulated online consumer products — supplements, cosmetics, food, more regulated than something like jewellery or fashion — a common misconception is that market entry takes about two years. One of my clients, wanting to bring a supplement product into Malaysia, believed exactly that from their own research. With our local team’s insight in Malaysia, we found their actual licence could be obtained in six to nine months — saving them around eighteen months of process. Personally I still think six to nine months is long; a lot can happen in that window. So let’s look at faster routes.

Approval timelines for health-related products across the region, roughly: Malaysia two to ten months minimum, Thailand four to six months, Vietnam one to six months, Philippines four to six months, and Singapore just five to ten days with about a month total turnaround. This can run longer if your product is genuinely novel or uses proprietary ingredients. Looking purely at speed, Singapore is the clear answer for fastest entry — but when I suggest this, people often push back that Singapore is “too small” and they’d rather target Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand for the bigger population. The reason to still consider Singapore first, if you’re not already established there: it has the highest median income in Southeast Asia, meaning more disposable spending power per capita, it has by far the fastest paperwork timeline, and it’s the region’s logistics hub — which matters enormously for what comes next.

Here’s the million-dollar Southeast Asia fulfilment setup a lot of brands coming into the region use. Step one: bring a bulk shipment — often thousands to tens of thousands of units — into Singapore through an Importer on Record, getting licensed within about a month, and store it in a warehouse there. Step two: that Singapore stock isn’t just for Singapore customers — you start accepting orders from across the region. When an order comes in from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam or the Philippines, you pick from the Singapore stock and fulfil it as an individual B2C parcel into that country. Because it’s a one- or two-item personal-consumption shipment, it’s typically exempt from full import licence requirements in the destination market.

We used exactly this model to help a UK beauty device brand enter Southeast Asia — their products, including LED and laser masks, are classified as medical devices in some countries in the region. Sending stock directly into somewhere like Vietnam the traditional way would have taken at least six months and roughly $10,000 in paperwork for that one market alone. Using the Singapore hub-and-fulfil model instead, our logistics partner picks and delivers from the Singapore stock into Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and beyond as needed, dramatically compressing both the cost and the timeline compared to licensing market by market.

That’s the framework behind our Gateway to Southeast Asia programme, which is eight steps. I’ll walk through how it worked for a real client. Step one is an onboarding call — understanding your brand goals, your product, and what documentation you already have. For one beauty-device client, their product could be classified as a beauty device in some countries and a medical device in others across the region — that distinction changes everything downstream. Step two is analysing the legal and regulatory requirements market by market, once we know which classification applies where. Step three is a timeline call, laying out a clear market-entry plan — for that client, that meant establishing Singapore as the hub and fulfilling from there rather than entering every market directly. Step four is product classification, specifically for genuinely new or proprietary ingredients or formulations that haven’t existed in the market before — this triggers a more in-depth submission and review process with the relevant authority. Step five, once classification is settled, is label compliance review — checking every detail of your labelling (content, claims, size, colour, format) against local regulation, working directly with your designer to make sure everything stays accurate as it’s revised.

Once documentation and labelling are ready, step six is applying for the licence through a designated Importer on Record, who holds the import licence, handles customs clearance for each shipment, and manages related accounting obligations — including things like GST filing if you’re also selling through a local marketplace account, which falls under a Merchant on Record instead. Step seven is actually shipping the product in and handling customs clearance for each shipment, and, if needed, connecting you with the right last-mile logistics and trucking partner for the specific market — one of the biggest mistakes brands make here is defaulting to a major courier like USPS, FedEx or DHL, which tends to be both expensive and less capable in markets they don’t specialise in. Step eight, once you’re live and running marketing campaigns, is local compliance monitoring — a dedicated compliance manager tracking both the country’s regulations and the rules of whichever platforms you’re selling on (Shopee, TikTok, Lazada), since platform violations (like running ads TikTok flags as non-compliant) are just as costly as a regulatory misstep. This includes producing an influencer compliance guide so content creators working with your brand know exactly what they can and can’t claim.

Secret three: you don’t need a website to go international. A lot of clients tell me they’ll start selling internationally “once the website is done.” I have a friend running a shoe brand in Vietnam who already had overseas customers messaging to buy — an easy next step to just accept international shipping — but she was waiting to set up a proper Shopify store first. What we discovered talking further: she was already selling on Shopee, Lazada and TikTok in Vietnam, and those same platforms operate cross-border. That meant she could sell into a new market using the exact same product listings, just through a local seller account.

The mechanism is a Merchant on Record — a local entity in the target market that sets up a local seller account for you on Shopee, Lazada or TikTok, and handles the VAT/GST and payout admin from that platform on your behalf. Once that’s live, the same marketing and operations team already running your home-market presence can extend into the new market with minimal extra setup — no separate website required. And if setting up on multiple platforms feels like its own project, the cheapest possible test is simply adding “we accept international shipping” to whatever website, Instagram or Facebook presence you already have, to see where real demand shows up before investing further.

To summarise the three secrets: one, you don’t need an importer — use an Importer on Record instead of a traditional distributor. Two, using Singapore as a regional hub with B2C fulfilment into the rest of Southeast Asia lets you skip years of separate market-by-market licensing. Three, you don’t need a website — TikTok, Shopee, Lazada, Instagram and Facebook, whatever you already have, can be the starting point.

[The recording continues with an in-depth walkthrough of the market-readiness offer available to attendees at the time of this session, live audience Q&A on TikTok Shop seller accounts and reseller/distributor deal structures, a labelling and advertising-compliance example using US TikTok ad rules, and closing remarks. Pricing and availability mentioned during the live session are specific to that date and are not repeated here — contact G.O.L directly for current options.]