Picture this: fifty economies, accounting for 60% of global e-commerce activity, all speaking different regulatory languages. Some require three signatures for a cross-border payment. Others demand paperwork that could fill a small lorry. Meanwhile, a woman entrepreneur in Pune has a brilliant product that could sell in Singapore, Seoul, and Sydney—but she’s drowning in compliance requirements before she’s even shipped her first parcel. This is the beautiful, chaotic mess that is Asia-Pacific digital trade in 2025.
Enter the 2nd Asia-Pacific E-commerce Policy Summit, held in New Delhi on 3-4 November 2025, where policymakers, industry leaders, and experts gathered with one audacious goal: to transform this fragmented landscape into a seamless, borderless digital marketplace. Co-hosted by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), UNESCAP, and backed by industry heavyweights including Amazon India and Startup India, the summit wasn’t just another talking shop. It was a statement of intent—with India positioning itself as the architect of the region’s digital trade future.
When Fragmentation Costs More Than Money
The Asia-Pacific region is an economic powerhouse. With the IMF forecasting 3.9% growth in 2025 and a projected e-commerce market reaching $6.1 trillion by 2030, the numbers alone tell a compelling story. Digital consumption surges from India, China, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia fuel nearly two-thirds of global online commerce. Yet beneath these impressive figures lies a frustrating reality: the very regulations meant to protect consumers and businesses are strangling the potential for truly integrated regional trade.
Fragmented regulations create invisible walls between markets. A small textile manufacturer in Jaipur wanting to sell in Jakarta faces different data governance rules, conflicting consumer protection standards, and incompatible payment systems. Multiply this across thousands of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and the scale of lost opportunity becomes staggering. As Nirupama Soundararajan, CEO of Policy Consensus Centre, articulated during the summit, “E-commerce is the biggest enabler for MSME exports, increasing access to global markets whilst keeping costs affordable.” The conditional clause hangs heavy: it can be, if we remove the barriers we’ve built ourselves.
The summit’s sessions hammered home a critical insight—policy harmonisation isn’t bureaucratic tidiness; it’s economic necessity. Streamlining data governance, simplifying export processes, and standardising digital documentation could unlock billions in trade value currently trapped by regulatory friction. When a seller in Chennai spends more time navigating compliance than improving their product, something is fundamentally broken. The discussions emphasised that creating predictable, transparent regulatory frameworks would enable MSMEs to channel resources into innovation and growth rather than administrative gymnastics.
Beyond the mechanics of trade facilitation, the summit spotlighted a demographic imperative often relegated to diversity panels: women-led enterprises. Digital tools exist in abundance, but as Dr. Arpita Mukherjee of ICRIER pointedly cautioned, “Empowerment and digital equipment are two different things. Women must first be digitally equipped and then truly empowered to lead in trade, innovation, and technology.” This distinction matters profoundly. Handing someone a smartphone and declaring them “empowered” is like giving someone car keys without teaching them to drive. Multiple sessions showcased successful regional models genuinely integrating women entrepreneurs into value chains, demonstrating that gender-responsive policies aren’t corporate social responsibility add-ons—they’re foundational to sustainable economic resilience.
The economic case is unassailable: women entrepreneurs bring different perspectives, serve underserved markets, and when properly supported, generate wealth that circulates through communities in ways that create multiplier effects. Yet structural barriers—from access to credit to digital literacy gaps to cultural expectations around business ownership—continue to constrain their participation. The summit’s emphasis on women’s digital leadership reflects growing recognition that inclusive growth isn’t just morally right; it’s economically intelligent. A region that sidelines half its potential entrepreneurial talent is deliberately competing with one hand tied behind its back.
Technology Isn’t the Future—It’s the Present We’re Still Learning to Use
Walk into any logistics hub in Asia-Pacific, and you’ll witness a peculiar time warp: cutting-edge tracking systems coexisting with manual paperwork, blockchain pilots running alongside fax machines, AI-powered inventory management shadowed by clipboards and carbon copies. The technological capacity exists; the integration doesn’t. This was the central tension explored in the summit’s innovation-focused sessions—not whether technology can transform digital trade, but why it isn’t transforming it faster.
Participants converged on several technological priorities. Secure, paperless trade systems emerged as non-negotiable for reducing costs and building trust. Currently, trade documentation inflates logistical complexity exponentially—every border crossing multiplies paperwork requirements, creating bottlenecks that slow transactions and increase error rates. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain promise to automate compliance checks, verify authenticity, and create transparent audit trails. The Reserve Bank of India and UNESCAP panelists particularly emphasised robust cross-border payment systems as critical infrastructure for accelerating transaction efficiency and building consumer confidence.
The payment challenge deserves special attention. Imagine selling a product from Mumbai to Manila—the transaction crosses currencies, banking systems, regulatory jurisdictions, and compliance frameworks. Each layer adds cost, time, and potential failure points. Interoperable payment systems that handle currency conversion, regulatory reporting, and settlement seamlessly could collapse days of processing into minutes. This isn’t theoretical; pilot programmes across ASEAN nations demonstrate viability. What’s lacking is political will to harmonise standards and commercial incentive to invest in regional infrastructure rather than national silos.
Amazon’s Global Selling programme illustrates the transformative potential when technology meets scale. With over 200,000 Indian sellers reaching more than 200 countries, the platform has doubled its export goals, crossing $20 billion in cumulative exports ahead of 2025 targets. Srinidhi Kalvapudi, Head of India Global Selling at Amazon India, announced an audacious vision: “Our vision is to reach $80 billion by 2030.” This isn’t corporate bluster; it’s backed by marketplace innovation and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure that makes cross-border selling accessible to businesses that couldn’t previously afford international expansion.
Yet technology alone doesn’t democratise opportunity—it often amplifies existing inequalities. A well-resourced company in Bengaluru can leverage AI, automate processes, and optimise logistics. A three-person operation in a Tier-3 city struggles with basic digital literacy. The summit repeatedly returned to this equity question: how do we ensure technological advancement doesn’t create a two-tier system where sophisticated players thrive whilst smaller enterprises get left further behind? Solutions discussed included affordable logistics partnerships, digital skilling programmes tailored to MSMEs, and platform design that reduces rather than increases complexity for new entrants.
The blockchain conversations proved particularly fascinating. Whilst blockchain advocates sometimes oversell the technology as a panacea, its applications in trade documentation, provenance verification, and smart contracts offer genuine value. Imagine a textile exporter providing verifiable proof of organic cotton sourcing, labour standards, and carbon footprint—all embedded in an immutable digital record that travels with the product. This transparency benefits conscious consumers, satisfies regulatory requirements, and differentiates ethical producers. But implementation requires standardisation across jurisdictions, which circles back to the policy harmonisation challenge.
From Conference Room Commitments to Market Reality
Summit declarations typically age like unrefrigerated dairy—promising at launch, questionable within weeks, actively off-putting after months. The organisers seemed aware of this cynicism. Rather than concluding with vague aspirational language about “exploring collaboration,” ICRIER announced concrete next steps: establishing a Working Group dedicated to crafting actionable policy recommendations by mid-2026. This specificity matters. A deadline creates accountability; a dedicated group with clear deliverables creates momentum.
The policy priorities identified represent a reasonable roadmap. Data interoperability sits at the foundation—without agreed standards for data sharing, protection, and governance, seamless digital trade remains fantasy. Consumer protection frameworks must balance safety with efficiency; overly cautious regulations that treat every transaction as high-risk create friction that benefits no one. AI governance emerged as increasingly urgent, particularly around privacy, algorithmic transparency, and fairness. As AI systems increasingly mediate trade decisions—from product recommendations to pricing algorithms to fraud detection—the rules governing these systems directly shape who succeeds and who doesn’t in digital commerce.
The sustainable digital transformation thread running through discussions reflects growing awareness that explosive growth without resilience creates fragility. Infrastructure must handle not just today’s transaction volumes but tomorrow’s surges. Digital systems must be secure against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Supply chains must demonstrate environmental and social responsibility to meet evolving consumer expectations and regulatory requirements. This triple mandate—scalability, security, sustainability—defines the future-ready ecosystem the summit envisioned.
Crucially, expert discussions centred on accessibility. The most sophisticated e-commerce infrastructure means nothing if MSMEs can’t afford to use it and women entrepreneurs can’t access it. Digital education must extend beyond basic computer literacy to practical business applications—how to manage inventory, market products, handle customer service, process payments, and navigate regulations. Affordable logistics partnerships must emerge that give small sellers access to the same shipping efficiency that large players command through volume. Interoperable platforms must design interfaces assuming users with limited technical sophistication, not assuming everyone is a digital native.
The women’s empowerment dimension deserves emphasis beyond tokenism. When Dr. Mukherjee distinguished between digital equipment and genuine empowerment, she articulated something crucial: tools without agency create dependence, not independence. A woman given an e-commerce storefront but lacking financial autonomy to reinvest profits hasn’t been empowered; she’s been given slightly shinier constraints. True empowerment requires addressing structural barriers—access to credit without male guarantors, business networks that actively include rather than tolerate women, family and social structures that support rather than sabotage women’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Digital trade can be a vehicle for this transformation, but only if policy explicitly designs for it.
The summit’s vision of a seamless, inclusive, equitable digital trade ecosystem sounds aspirational until you examine the alternatives. The current fragmented approach leaves enormous value unrealised, systematically disadvantages smaller players, and creates inefficiencies that benefit no one except perhaps the compliance consulting industry. Moving towards unified policies, interoperable systems, and inclusive design isn’t idealism; it’s pragmatism. The question isn’t whether Asia-Pacific will eventually harmonise its digital trade infrastructure—the competitive pressure and economic opportunity guarantee it will. The question is whether the region does so intentionally, inclusively, and equitably, or whether market forces and dominant players shape integration in ways that entrench rather than reduce inequality.
The 2nd Asia-Pacific E-commerce Policy Summit positioned these choices clearly. With 50 economies representing 60% of global e-commerce activity and a $6.1 trillion market on the horizon, the stakes justify the diplomatic heavy lifting required for genuine cooperation. India’s willingness to convene stakeholders, anchor policy development, and champion inclusive growth signals recognition that regional leadership offers strategic advantage. For Indian MSMEs and entrepreneurs, a harmonised Asia-Pacific digital trade ecosystem multiplies market access exponentially. For the region, India’s combination of scale, technical capacity, and democratic governance offers a different model than China’s state-directed approach or the fragmented incrementalism that has characterised ASEAN digital integration efforts.
Whether conference room commitments translate to market reality depends on execution. The Working Group’s 2026 deliverables will reveal whether this summit catalyses genuine change or joins the archive of well-intentioned declarations. Early indicators suggest reasons for cautious optimism—concrete timelines, identified priorities, institutional backing, and commercial buy-in from players like Amazon who have direct stakes in smoother cross-border commerce. But the gap between policy recommendations and implementation remains where most regional cooperation initiatives founder. Sovereign nations don’t easily cede regulatory authority, even when economic logic suggests cooperation. Domestic political pressures often override regional coordination commitments. And the technical challenges of interoperability shouldn’t be underestimated—making disparate systems communicate requires painstaking technical work that doesn’t generate headlines.
The revolution that started in a Delhi conference room won’t be finished there. It will be finished in revised regulations, deployed infrastructure, trained entrepreneurs, and billions of seamless transactions that never would have happened under the old fragmented system. It will be measured in women-led businesses reaching customers they couldn’t previously access, MSMEs competing on quality rather than compliance capacity, and consumers benefiting from choice, price competition, and transparency. The summit laid the roadmap; now comes the harder work of actually building the future it envisioned. But for the first time, that future feels less like aspiration and more like emerging reality—one harmonised policy, one interoperable system, one empowered entrepreneur at a time.