Live Commerce in Vietnam: Seller Verification, Affiliate Rules & Duties
Key Points
- Vietnam's Law on E-Commerce 122/2025/QH15 has covered livestream selling and affiliate marketing since 1 July 2026
- Platforms must verify a livestream seller's identity before broadcast, and creators must refuse sellers who cannot produce the product documents
- Brands should build a document pack per SKU and rewrite creator and affiliate agreements around refusal and takedown duties
Vietnam now regulates livestream selling and affiliate marketing in its own statute
Until this summer, an overseas brand selling through Vietnamese livestreams worked from three documents: the marketplace's seller terms, the Advertising Law, and whatever the agency had written into the creator's contract. The Law on E-Commerce No. 122/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 July 2026 and added a fourth [1]. Article 24 sets out what a person who livestreams to sell has to do, and a separate part of the same law covers affiliate marketing services [2].
Earlier rules reached the trader and the marketplace. The new duties name the person on camera and the affiliate who posts the link, so the compliance work now lands on people the brand does not employ.
That moves a legal question into the production schedule. Identity verification, document checks and, in regulated categories, advertising copy the authorities have already confirmed all sit before the broadcast rather than after it [2]. A campaign booked on last year's contract template can stall at the moment a platform asks the creator for something nobody prepared.
None of this applies only to foreign sellers. It is harder for them because the paperwork that proves a product is legal in Vietnam was usually assembled somewhere else, in another language, by a team that has never been asked to produce it at short notice.
Identity checks and product documents now gate whether a broadcast can happen
A platform has to run electronic identity authentication on a livestream seller before letting that seller broadcast, and foreign participants are verified through legal documents [3]. The second check belongs to the creator. Under Article 24, a person who livestreams to sell must refuse to work with a seller who does not hand over the documents showing that the goods are legal and meet quality requirements [4]. In regulated categories the creator may present only content matching advertising that the authorities have already confirmed, and has to stop broadcasting or take content down once a violation is clear or an official body asks [2].
The sequence is what catches brands out. Verification happens before the session, not in a legal review three weeks later. A skincare brand that ships product to a creator in Da Nang and sends the brief the night before has skipped the step that decides whether the session runs at all.
The document pack is therefore a scheduling item as much as a legal one. Brands that already hold import papers, test certificates and registration numbers per SKU have most of it. Brands that hold them per shipment, or in a lawyer's inbox, will probably spend the first two weeks of a campaign assembling them, and the media plan has already spent that time.
Affiliate links carry their own authentication and takedown duties
The affiliate provisions come in a pair. A provider of affiliate marketing services must authenticate the affiliates it signs up and refuse to carry banned goods and services, while the affiliate has to remove links to products that break the law, either on finding out or when an authority asks [5].
Two platforms carry most of the traffic this covers. Shopee held 57.5% of Vietnamese e-commerce GMV in 2025 and TikTok Shop 39.6%, up from 26.9% a year earlier, and together the two recorded 280 trillion dong in the first half of 2026 (Chart 1) [6].
Most affiliate programmes that overseas brands run were designed around payouts rather than removal. A brand that has seeded 400 creators with a tracked link has 400 places where a discontinued or non-compliant SKU can keep selling, and usually nobody owns the question of who pulls those links on a Saturday. Writing a response time into the affiliate agreement, and keeping one list of live links with a name against it, costs very little now. Retrofitting it after the first request from an authority is the expensive version, and it arrives in the middle of a campaign rather than before one.
Prepare the paperwork before the booking, and name a local owner for approvals
For a brand already booked into fourth-quarter livestreams, the work splits three ways. Build a document pack per SKU, covering legality, quality and, for regulated categories, the confirmed advertising copy, and give it to the creator before the booking rather than after [4]. Rewrite creator and affiliate agreements so that refusal, takedown and a response time appear in them [5]. Name one person in Vietnam who owns approvals and can answer a platform or an authority the same day.
None of that is heavy work, though the first pack usually takes longer than the brief suggests, because the papers sit in different systems and different languages. Agencies in Ho Chi Minh City have been rewriting their templates since the summer, so a brand that asks for the current version will normally get one.
For campaigns signed before July, the more realistic reading is that the contracts, not the creative, are the thing to reopen. Platforms hold the verification switch, and they will use it on the next booking rather than the last one [3].
References
- Tạp chí Kinh tế Tài chính, 2026 · https://tapchikinhtetaichinh.vn/bay-trach-nhiem-cua-nguoi-livestream-ban-hang-tu-ngay-172026-157729.html
- Tạp chí Kinh tế Tài chính, 2026 · https://tapchikinhtetaichinh.vn/bay-trach-nhiem-cua-nguoi-livestream-ban-hang-tu-ngay-172026-157729.html
- Tuổi Trẻ / Pháp Luật TP.HCM, 2026 · https://tuoitre.vn/plo/tu-1-7-2026-nguoi-livestream-ban-hang-va-tiep-thi-lien-ket-phai-xac-thuc-danh-tinh-109886292.htm
- Tuổi Trẻ / Pháp Luật TP.HCM, 2026 · https://tuoitre.vn/plo/tu-1-7-2026-nguoi-livestream-ban-hang-va-tiep-thi-lien-ket-phai-xac-thuc-danh-tinh-109886292.htm
- Tuổi Trẻ / Pháp Luật TP.HCM, 2026 · https://tuoitre.vn/plo/tu-1-7-2026-nguoi-livestream-ban-hang-va-tiep-thi-lien-ket-phai-xac-thuc-danh-tinh-109886292.htm
- VnExpress, 2026 · https://vnexpress.net/doanh-so-tren-tiktok-shop-tang-66-5102594.html
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