TL;DR
- Pijittra Ruangwattanapaisan, founder of Sonar and a 2026 Certified Shopee Mentor, said at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce PACE for SME seminar that keyword search carries more than 70 percent of Shopee sales.
- Brand Inside published the claim on 28 August 2026 in an article labelled Branded Content, does not publish the seminar deck, and carries no confirmation of the 70 percent figure from Shopee.
- Her framework treats Shopee Live and Shopee Video as secondary roads, Shopee Affiliate as reach, and Shopee Ads as an express lane, and argues blanket ad spend is wasted when the real problem is low conversion.
- Conversion fixes she names are discount structure, shipping cost management and clearer product images, plus protecting Hero Products from stockouts during big campaigns even on thin margins.
- Supporting data in the same article: Thai internet users second worldwide for weekly online shopping at 68.6 percent against 56.5 percent globally, PwC 2025 at over 52 percent of consumers dropping a brand after one bad experience, and NielsenIQ putting physical stores at 77 percent of FMCG sales.
Keyword search carries more than 70 percent of sales on Shopee, according to Pijittra Ruangwattanapaisan, founder of the Thai electrical brand Sonar, owner of the ProMai Business School for online sellers and a 2026 Certified Shopee Mentor, speaking at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce PACE for SME seminar. Brand Inside published her framework on 28 August 2026 in a piece on platform literacy for Thai SMEs, and labelled that piece Branded Content.
Both halves of that sentence matter. If the figure holds, it says that the single biggest lever on a Shopee shop is not the ad budget and not the livestream schedule, it is whether the listing gets found by someone typing a product name into the search bar. And because the claim comes from a seminar rather than from Shopee, it needs checking against your own numbers before you rebuild a strategy on it.
Who said it, where, and what the article does not include
Pijittra Ruangwattanapaisan made the statement at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce PACE for SME seminar, and Brand Inside reported it on 28 August 2026. Her stated credentials in the article are founder of Sonar, a Thai electrical brand, owner of the ProMai Business School for online sellers, and 2026 Certified Shopee Mentor. That last title connects her to the platform, which is worth knowing when reading a platform statistic.
The article is labelled Branded Content. It does not publish the underlying seminar deck, and it carries no confirmation of the 70 percent figure from Shopee itself. So this is a practitioner claim reported in a sponsored piece, not a published platform statistic. Nobody has to dismiss it for that reason. It does mean the number should be treated as a hypothesis you test in your own seller data rather than a benchmark you plan against.
Saying that plainly is not scepticism for its own sake. A seller who reallocates budget on a 70 percent figure that turns out to be 40 percent in their category has made an expensive decision on someone else's data.
The road model: search as the main road, everything else as feeders
The framing Pijittra Ruangwattanapaisan used at the seminar treats Shopee as a road network. Shopee keyword search is the main road and carries the majority of sales. Shopee Live and Shopee Video are secondary roads. Shopee Affiliate extends reach. Shopee Ads is the express lane for accelerating sales that are already moving.
The useful thing about that model is what it implies about sequencing. An express lane speeds up traffic that already exists, it does not create demand where none is being expressed. If the main road is broken, meaning the listing does not surface for the terms buyers actually type, then paying to accelerate is paying to move a smaller number of people faster. Secondary roads carry real volume and are worth running, but a shop that has a live schedule and no search visibility is running feeders into a closed junction.
This is the same argument search marketers make about paid and organic on Google, arriving from a different direction. It also lines up with how marketplace demand behaves: shoppers on Shopee are usually in the market already, so they arrive with a product name in mind and type it.
Traffic, conversion rate and average order value are three separate problems
The operating part of her framework starts with three variables that produce revenue: traffic, conversion rate, and average order value or revenue per buyer. The argument she made is that blanket ad spend is wasted when the actual problem sits in the second variable. If people are arriving and not buying, buying more arrivals makes the leak bigger, not smaller.
Her named fixes for a conversion problem are discount structure, shipping cost management, and clearer and more attractive product images. None of those cost media budget. All of them change what happens after the click, which is where the money was actually being lost.
This is the most transferable idea in the article and it survives whether the 70 percent figure is exactly right or not. Diagnose before spending. A shop doing 10,000 visits at 1 percent conversion and a shop doing 2,000 visits at 5 percent conversion produce the same orders, and they need opposite interventions. The first has an offer and listing problem, the second has a demand problem. Only the second one should be buying more ads.
Hero Products and the stockout you cannot afford
The third part of the framework is inventory segmentation. Hero Products get protected from stockouts even when their margins are thin, and the protection matters most during big campaign periods, when the platform pushes a wave of traffic through the system.
The logic is that a hero product is the item that pulls people into the shop, and running out during a campaign wastes the traffic the campaign was supposed to convert. A thin margin on a hero item is the cost of acquiring a session that then buys other things. Treating that item as a low priority because its own margin looks bad is optimising the wrong line.
The market data assembled around the claim
Brand Inside placed the seminar material inside a set of published statistics from named research organisations. The table below lists those figures with the organisation each one is attributed to in the article, so you can weigh them separately from the seminar claim.
| Figure | What it measures | Attributed to |
|---|---|---|
| 68.6 percent against a global average of 56.5 percent | Share of internet users shopping online weekly, putting Thailand second in the world | Cited in the Brand Inside article without a named research source |
| Over 52 percent | Consumers who will stop buying from a brand after one bad experience such as late delivery or an unanswered or off target chat reply | PwC Customer Experience report, 2025 |
| 81 percent and 73 percent | Customers expecting faster service, and customers demanding more precise personalisation | Reported alongside the PwC finding in the same article |
| 60 percent of APAC consumers | Willingness to spend more when brands tailor the interaction, with Gen Z and Millennials more likely to do so than Gen X and Boomers | Twilio |
| 77 percent | Share of FMCG sales still going through physical stores | NielsenIQ, Consumer Outlook: Guide to 2026 |
Read together, those numbers describe a shopper who is online constantly, intolerant of one bad delivery, expects the reply to be fast and relevant, and still buys most of their groceries in a shop. The article describes the resulting journey as non linear: someone discovers a product on social, asks ChatGPT to compare specifications, touches the product in a physical store, then buys in an ecommerce app because the discount is there.
How to sanity check the 70 percent in your own account
You do not need the seminar deck to test the claim, because your own shop already answers it. If your seller reporting breaks visits down by where they came from, pull a period long enough to cover both a campaign week and a normal week, then look at the split between search, live, video, affiliate and paid placements. Do it by revenue rather than by sessions, because sessions and orders can point in very different directions.
Then run the same split by product. A shop can be at 70 percent search overall while its newest listings sit near zero, and the average hides exactly the products that need work. Categories differ too: an item people search by name behaves nothing like an impulse category discovered in a video feed, and one national average cannot describe both.
Whatever number comes back is the one to plan against. If search is genuinely carrying most of your revenue, listing work outranks ad work. If it is not, the road model still holds but your main road is somewhere else.
Marketplace listing optimisation is search optimisation with a different index
If keyword search carries the majority of marketplace sales, then a product listing is a search result and the work on it is search work. The mechanics differ from Google, because the index is one company's catalogue and the ranking signals include sales velocity, review count, response rate and stock status alongside text relevance. The discipline is the same: find the words buyers actually use, put them where the index reads them, and remove the reasons the result gets skipped.
That means the title carries real query language rather than internal product codes, the attribute fields are filled in because filters read them, and the images answer the question the buyer is silently asking before they scroll on. It also means keyword research done for search engine optimisation is not wasted on the marketplace side, since Thai buyers rarely change their vocabulary between a Google search and a Shopee search. The demand terms are the same terms.
The gap most brands have is that these two workstreams sit in different teams. The ecommerce marketing team owns the marketplace listings, the search team owns the website, and neither sees the other's query data. For brands running their own storefront alongside a marketplace presence, the same keyword set should be driving both the Shopify store product pages and the Shopee titles, because a shopper researching in one place and buying in the other is exactly the non linear journey the article describes.
What this means for Thai marketers
Thailand is an unusually marketplace heavy market, and the weekly online shopping figure quoted in the article, 68.6 percent against a global average of 56.5 percent, is a reasonable proxy for how normal buying on a platform has become here. That makes marketplace search visibility a demand channel in its own right rather than a merchandising chore.
The practical order of work follows the diagnostic, not the trend. Establish which of the three variables is actually broken before touching budget. Fix listing and offer problems with listing and offer tools, meaning titles, attributes, images, shipping terms and discount structure. Use ads to accelerate products that already convert. And keep hero items in stock through campaign periods, because the campaign traffic arrives whether the inventory did or not.
Finally, treat the 70 percent as a prompt to look, not as a fact to quote in your own deck. The claim came from a Certified Shopee Mentor at a seminar and was published in a piece labelled Branded Content with no confirmation from Shopee. Your own traffic source report is the version of that number you are allowed to plan against.
FAQ on the Shopee keyword search claim
Is the 70 percent figure an official Shopee statistic?
No. It is a statement made by Pijittra Ruangwattanapaisan at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce PACE for SME seminar, reported by Brand Inside on 28 August 2026 in an article labelled Branded Content. The article does not publish the seminar deck and carries no confirmation of the figure from Shopee.
Does it apply to every product category?
The source does not break the figure down by category, so there is no basis for assuming it does. A category people search by name and a category discovered in a video feed will not share a traffic mix, which is why the split is worth pulling from your own shop rather than borrowing a single average.
Should I stop running Shopee Ads?
Nothing in the source says to stop. The framing puts Shopee Ads as the express lane for accelerating sales, with the argument that blanket ad spend is wasted when the real problem is a low conversion rate, which she says is fixed instead through discount structure, shipping cost management and clearer, more attractive product images.
What exactly is a Hero Product in this framework?
It is the inventory tier that gets protected from stockouts even on thin margins, especially during big campaigns when the platform floods the system with traffic. The article presents it as one of three parts of the framework, alongside managing the traffic, conversion rate and average order value variables and using every channel the platform provides.
Where do the PwC, Twilio and NielsenIQ numbers come from?
They are separate published findings that Brand Inside assembled around the seminar material, not part of the seminar claim. PwC's 2025 Customer Experience report is cited for over 52 percent of consumers dropping a brand after one bad experience, Twilio for 60 percent of APAC consumers willing to spend more for tailored interactions, and NielsenIQ's Consumer Outlook: Guide to 2026 for physical stores holding 77 percent of FMCG sales.
If you want to know whether search really carries your marketplace revenue, the answer is already sitting in your seller reporting and it takes an afternoon to pull. Read the original article at Brand Inside, run the split, and talk to Relevant Audience if the numbers say your listings are doing the work your ad budget was being credited for.
