S’pore livestreams struggle to sell, but these bizs have cracked the code

Live commerce is taking off almost everywhere in Asia but in Singapore

On paper, Singapore’s live commerce scene appears to be growing.

TikTok Shop Singapore’s livestream GMV grew 85% by Apr 2025 compared to a year earlier, while social commerce is expected to account for roughly a third of Singapore’s e-commerce market.

Yet if you’ve ever stumbled into a local TikTok livestream, the reality often looks very different.

Instead of thousands of viewers piling into a show, many sellers find themselves talking to a few dozen people waiting for the next voucher code before scrolling away.

That gap matters because live commerce has exploded almost everywhere else in Asia, from China’s billion-dollar livestream stars to Malaysian creators earning full-time incomes from daily broadcasts.

The format has become almost routine across Southeast Asia. In 2023, nearly five in 10 consumers watched livestream sales at least once a week, and 63% of viewers went on to make a purchase.

In Singapore, that figure was just 40%. Still, a handful of local brands have managed to make livestreaming work.

The brands that have made it work

The three brands Vulcan Post spoke to—Tasty Toastys, Tap Space, and Emporal Co.—operate in completely different categories.

One sells bread-themed plushies, another sells MRT-inspired collectibles, and the third sells candles and haircare.

Yet they’ve all found growth through livestreaming.

1. Make the livestream itself entertaining

For Tasty Toastys, livestreams became less about pitching products and more about giving fans something fun to watch.

Founder Chanel Lee discovered that her bread-character collectibles naturally created “watchable” moments—whether it was unboxing plushies, showing new designs, or letting fans react together in real time.

That communal experience helped the brand grow beyond local consignment shelves into 12 Toys “R” Us outlets and even a dedicated US TikTok Shop.

If the product creates anticipation on screen, viewers stay longer.

2. Consistency pays off

Transport-collectible brand Tap Space arguably had one of the toughest starting points. Founder Danial Sim launched with zero followers and a marketing budget of just S$50.

His solution wasn’t clever growth hacks—it was consistency.

Every night after dinner, he livestreamed himself showing the MRT station keychains he’d made.

Those sessions gradually brought in a few hundred followers each day, eventually snowballing into a business capable of selling 1,500 products in a single day at a Takashimaya pop-up before selling out by day three.

Consistency compounds, even when early audiences are small.

3. Putting a face behind the brand

The sisters behind skincare and candle brand Emporal Co., Grace and Lena Lim, spent two months making zero sales.

Then, one TikTok video went viral.

Instead of relying solely on that lucky break, they kept posting daily content featuring themselves and their products, turning followers into customers who later showed up in real life. Grace has even been recognised in public by people who’ve supported the brand for years, with one customer stopping her to ask for a selfie.

Today, the business generates six-figure annual sales, has sold over 17,000 bottles of leave-in hair conditioner in two years, and attracted around 400–450 people to a warehouse sale built largely through TikTok.

Their biggest advantage was familiarity.

A different playbook for live commerce

None of these brands relies on the tactics commonly associated with livestream commerce elsewhere.

Instead of aggressive countdown timers or endless discounts, they lean on three key pilars: Consistency, a strong visual hook, and a founder whose personality is the product.

That matters because Singapore’s structural reality is very different from its neighbours’.

The single most important reason live commerce exploded across Asia is one Singapore simply doesn’t have: large populations living far from physical retail.

Indonesia’s rural population sits at around 41%, but is spread across over 17,000 islands. That means hundreds of millions of people live without convenient mall access. In Vietnam and the Philippines, rural populations exceed 60% and 50% respectively.

Livestreaming doesn’t just entertain these consumers, but brings the market to them. And in a way, residents in rural areas have become micro-retailers in their own homes. Farmers and artisans in rural China now sell directly to urban consumers through live broadcasts, bypassing the physical retail infrastructure they never had. 

Unlike Indonesia or Vietnam, where millions of consumers live far from physical retail, Singapore has one of ASEAN’s highest concentrations of shopping malls. Most people can reach a mall within minutes.

Whereas in Singapore, the city-state has the highest retail space per capita in ASEAN, at 1.08 square metres per person — nearly double Bangkok’s 0.8 sqm and significantly above Kuala Lumpur’s 0.71 sqm. Total retail space on the island stands at 6.1 million square metres, making Singapore one of the most mall-dense cities in the world.

The urgency that drives impulse purchases on a livestream—”I can’t get this anywhere near me”—simply doesn’t apply in Singapore.

And vouchers, which dominate many local TikTok streams, don’t necessarily solve that problem. They can give viewers a reason to tune in briefly, redeem a code, and leave.

The brands succeeding in Singapore have therefore had to solve a different problem: not how to make people buy, but how to make them want to stay.

Trust is also a barrier

Trust is the foundation of live commerce. You’re buying from a person you’ve watched for 20 minutes, often without seeing the product in person first. And many viewers who find trust in a livestreamer will often return for more.

In markets where livestreaming took off early, before bad actors moved in, that trust was established before it could be eroded. However, Singapore got the livestream scams before the culture could concretise.

TikTok-related scam cases in Singapore rose nearly 38% in 2025, according to the Singapore Police Force’s Annual Scam and Cybercrime Brief, making it the only major platform where scam cases increased, even as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Carousell all saw declines.

A famous jade stones livestreaming scam in 2023 even caused losses of at least S$95,000. 

On the bureaucratic level, TikTok itself rejected 1.4 million seller applications and removed 700,000 sellers for policy violations in H1 2025 alone, which tells you both how aggressive TikTok enforcement has become and how serious the underlying problem of scams really is.

When shoppers become wary of livestream sellers, every legitimate creator has to work harder to earn credibility.

Singapore’s version of live commerce may look smaller, but more personal

As Singapore’s live commerce ecosystem develops, some businesses are looking overseas for answers.

Some retailers have travelled to Hangzhou for livestream training, while others are experimenting with AI avatar hosts— already big business in China, with the market projected to hit US$90.1 billion (S$115.2 billion) this year, with over 993,000 companies using digital avatars.

But importing the mechanics of a more mature market doesn’t necessarily mean importing its success.

The biggest takeaway from the brands that have made livestreaming work here is that Singapore may need its own version of live commerce.

The winning formula isn’t necessarily bigger audiences, more frequent streams, or deeper discounts. It’s giving a relatively small audience a reason to keep coming back.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Tasty Toastys/ Emporal Co./ Tap Space