You have already sorted your listing photos. Then you switch on ads, and suddenly the platform wants something different: a banner, a 3:4 crop, a file under 50 KB, a creative submitted a week in advance. Most sellers discover this the hard way, halfway through setting up a campaign, at 11pm, with a promotion starting tomorrow.
Southeast Asian ad creative specs are also the worst documented in e-commerce. Amazon, Google and Meta publish tidy public spec sheets. Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop bury half of theirs behind a Seller Centre login or hand them to you via an account manager. This guide pulls together what is actually verifiable, and — just as importantly — tells you which ad products need no new creative at all.
The single most useful thing to know first
The majority of ad spend on Shopee and Lazada goes through ad formats that do not accept a separate creative. Shopee Search Ads (formerly Boosted Products) and Lazada Sponsored Discovery both pull your existing product cover image straight from the listing. There is no upload step, no separate crop, no approval queue.
This has a consequence people miss: your listing cover image is your ad creative. If it is soft, badly cropped, or sitting at the 500 x 500 minimum, you are paying per click to show a weak image. Fixing the cover image on your top 20 SKUs is usually a bigger lever than any banner you will design this quarter.
So the work splits into two jobs. Job one: make your listing covers good enough to advertise. Job two: build banner creatives, but only for the formats that genuinely need them.
Shopee ad creative specs
Search Ads and Discovery Ads: your cover image, unchanged
These formats use the product image already on the listing, so the listing spec is the ad spec:
- Minimum: 500 x 500 px
- Recommended: 1024 x 1024 px (this is what unlocks usable zoom)
- Aspect ratio: 1:1 square
- Formats: JPG/JPEG or PNG
- Max file size: 2 MB per image; some categories permit up to 5 MB
- Images per listing: up to 9, including the cover
- Description images: minimum 900 x 900 px, up to 12 additional images
Two practical notes. First, aim for the product to occupy roughly 70% of the frame — Shopee's own guidance leans this way, and a product floating small in white space loses badly in a crowded search grid where the thumbnail may render at only 150–200 px. Second, keep files under about 1 MB even though 2 MB is allowed. Shopee's audience is overwhelmingly mobile, frequently on patchy connections, and a slow-loading ad thumbnail is a click you paid for and did not receive.
Shop decoration and shop banners
Shop Ads send traffic to your shop rather than a single SKU, which means the shop page itself becomes part of the creative. The decoration specs are public:
- Carousel banner: 2668 x 1334 px, 2:1 aspect ratio, JPG/JPEG/PNG, max 2 MB per image
- Shop homepage banner: 1200 px wide, 100–2200 px tall, JPG/JPEG/PNG, max 2 MB
That 2:1 carousel is the one people get wrong most often. Because it is cropped differently on app versus web, keep all text and logos within the central 80% of the frame. Anything at the edges is a candidate for being sliced off on someone's phone.
Display Ads: the format with the real gatekeeping
Shopee Display Ads place your creative in the homepage banner carousel — the highest-traffic real estate on the platform, in carousel slots such as #9, #10, #12 and #13. The barriers are commercial rather than technical:
- Eligibility: Mall sellers only, and currently only whitelisted Mall sellers
- Minimum budget: S$600 for a single Display Ads campaign in Singapore
- Creative deadline: submit at least 7 days before the banner goes live
That seven-day deadline is the detail that catches sellers out. Creatives can be sent back for adjustment, so treat the deadline as ten days if you want a rejection to be survivable. Exact pixel specs for Display Ads are issued through Seller Centre or your account manager and vary by market and placement — ask for the current spec sheet in writing rather than reusing last year's template.
Lazada ad creative specs
Sponsored Discovery and Sponsored Search
Same principle as Shopee: these serve your existing product main image. No separate creative, no separate approval. Lazada also runs its own automated quality checks on product images, so a listing that is already compliant is already ad-ready.
Sponsored Affiliate: the long size list
This is where Lazada genuinely differs. Sponsored Affiliate creatives run across affiliate and off-platform placements, so Lazada accepts a wide catalogue of standard display sizes. The accepted dimensions include:
| Shape | Accepted sizes (px) | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Square | 1200 x 1200, 1090 x 1090, 600 x 600 | Social and in-feed placements |
| Landscape | 1200 x 628, 1200 x 630, 800 x 400, 640 x 320, 1200 x 900, 700 x 500, 640 x 200 | Article and feed banners |
| Leaderboard | 728 x 90, 468 x 60, 428 x 90, 1400 x 428 | Top-of-page web banners |
| Skyscraper | 160 x 600, 120 x 600, 300 x 600 | Sidebar placements |
| Rectangle / mobile | 300 x 250, 300 x 100, 320 x 50 | In-article and mobile banners |
Lazada's stated creative rules are refreshingly blunt: the font colour must not blend into the background colour, and the SKU photo must be clear and visible. Both rejections come from the same root cause — designing a banner at full size on a desktop monitor and never checking it at 320 x 50.
Sponsored Display, which buys banner placements on the Lazada homepage, category pages and flash sale sections, is a whitelisted solution. If you are eligible but cannot see it in Seller Centre, your seller ID has to be granted access by your commercial contact. Lazada's Creative Center also offers pre-built banner templates that can generate multiple sizes at once, which is worth using as a baseline even if you redo the design yourself.
Producing twenty sizes without twenty designs
Twenty accepted sizes does not mean twenty designs. Build three master layouts — one square, one landscape, one tall — with all critical elements inside a generous safe area, then derive the rest. Batch resizing the derivatives with a tool like PixelPrep takes minutes and keeps every output at the exact pixel dimensions the platform expects, which matters here because "close enough" dimensions are a common silent rejection cause on affiliate placements.
TikTok Shop ad creative specs
TikTok Shop is video-first, but images still do real work in three places.
Video Shopping Ads
- Aspect ratio: 9:16 recommended; 1:1 and 16:9 supported
- Minimum resolution: 540 x 960 (9:16), 640 x 640 (1:1), 960 x 540 (16:9)
- Max file size: 500 MB
- Length: up to 10 minutes
- Formats: .mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, .avi
Captions do not support clickable links, @ mentions or hashtags, and sound is strongly recommended.
Product card images
Product cards are generated from the catalogue feed you upload to TikTok Ads Manager, showing the product image, name and price. Feed images should be 1:1 or 3:4, at 720 px or above, and you can attach one to four products to a single video.
Display images
The tightest constraint on the platform: display images must be 1:1, under 50 KB, in .png, .jpeg or .jpg. Fifty kilobytes is genuinely small. A 1:1 image at 500 x 500 in JPEG at quality 70–75 will usually land under it; anything with a busy photographic background will not. Simple compositions on flat backgrounds compress far better here, which is a rare case where design simplicity is a hard technical requirement rather than a taste preference.
Cross-platform quick reference
| Format | Needs new creative? | Key spec |
|---|---|---|
| Shopee Search Ads | No — uses cover image | 1024 x 1024, 1:1, under 1 MB |
| Shopee shop carousel | Yes | 2668 x 1334, 2:1, max 2 MB |
| Shopee homepage banner | Yes | 1200 px wide, 100–2200 px tall |
| Shopee Display Ads | Yes | Mall + whitelist, S$600 min, 7-day lead |
| Lazada Sponsored Discovery | No — uses main image | Listing spec applies |
| Lazada Sponsored Affiliate | Yes | 20+ sizes; 1200 x 628 and 300 x 250 first |
| TikTok Video Shopping Ads | Yes (video) | 9:16, min 540 x 960 |
| TikTok product card | No — uses feed image | 1:1 or 3:4, 720 px+ |
| TikTok display image | Yes | 1:1, under 50 KB |
Where campaigns actually fail
Designing for desktop, serving to mobile. Nearly all Shopee and Lazada impressions are mobile. Preview every banner at roughly a third of its design size before approving it. If the product is not identifiable at that scale, the creative does not work.
Text that survives design review but not compression. Thin light-grey type on a white background looks elegant at 1200 px and disappears at 320 px, and it is exactly the case Lazada's contrast rule exists to catch.
Upscaling to hit a spec. Stretching an 800 px image to 1200 x 1200 produces a soft creative that will underperform even if it technically uploads. Shoot or source at the largest size you need and scale down.
Reusing Meta creative verbatim. A 1080 x 1080 Meta ad is not a Lazada affiliate banner. The aspect ratio may match a 1090 x 1090 slot, but the promotional overlay, pricing claims and calls to action usually do not comply with marketplace rules.
Your pre-launch checklist
- Audit the cover images on your top 20 SKUs. Anything below 1024 x 1024 gets replaced before you spend on Search Ads or Sponsored Discovery.
- Confirm which of your planned formats need a separate creative — roughly half do not.
- Build three master layouts (square, landscape, tall) with all text inside the central 80%.
- Derive every required size by batch resizing rather than redesigning.
- Compress to under 1 MB for marketplace images, and under 50 KB for TikTok display images.
- Preview each banner at one-third size on a phone before approving.
- Check contrast between text and background at the smallest accepted size.
- For Shopee Display Ads, submit at least 7 days ahead — plan for 10 to absorb one round of rejection.
- Request the current spec sheet in writing from your account manager for any whitelisted format; these change between markets and campaigns.
The unglamorous conclusion is that most Southeast Asian ad performance is decided by the listing cover image, not by the banner. Fix that first, then produce banners systematically rather than one panicked crop at a time.