Vietnam entered a new regulatory era on July 1, 2026, when the Law on E-commerce 2025 (Law No. 122/2025/QH15) and the Law on Digital Transformation 2025, part of a package of 29 laws, two ordinances, and 34 decrees, took simultaneous effect (Vietnam Briefing). The e-commerce law, passed by the National Assembly on December 10, 2025, is Vietnam's first standalone statute governing online marketplaces, replacing a patchwork of decrees dating to 2013 (Chinhphu.vn). The Digital Transformation Law, passed December 11, 2025 with 433 of 442 deputies in favor, adds a parallel data-governance layer (Digital Policy Alert).
What the law actually does
The statute sorts platforms into four categories — direct-sales, intermediary, social-commerce, and integrated — and attaches different obligations to each (Chinhphu.vn). Every platform must verify seller identity electronically — increasingly through the state's VNeID digital-ID rail — before allowing a transaction, take down unlawful content within 24 hours of notice, and retain transaction and livestream records for three years (Conventus Law). Most consequentially, platforms now carry joint liability with sellers for counterfeit goods, prohibited products, and misleading content — a sharp break from the pure notice-and-takedown model most jurisdictions still use.
Foreign platforms face their own tier. Any cross-border operator using Vietnamese-language content, a .vn domain, or exceeding roughly 100,000 annual local transactions must establish a Vietnamese legal entity or, if exempted under a trade agreement, post a bank security deposit to backstop consumer compensation claims (Conventus Law). The Ministry of Industry and Trade issued the implementing decree, No. 248/2026/ND-CP, on June 30, 2026, one day before the law took effect, and the ministry's own rollout plan pushes detailed administrative-penalty rules to Q4 2026 under Prime Minister Decision 776/QĐ-TTg (Chinhphu.vn) — meaning platforms must comply with a joint-liability regime months before knowing what breaching it actually costs.
The case for the law
Hanoi's justification is not manufactured. Vietnamese e-commerce has grown 20-30% annually and now accounts for roughly 11% of total retail and consumer-services revenue nationwide, up from a market worth an estimated $25 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $63 billion by 2030 — among the fastest expansion rates of any e-commerce market globally (Chinhphu.vn; Conventus Law). That growth arrived without a dedicated statute, running instead on a 2013 decree written for a market a fraction of today's size. Counterfeit goods, unlicensed livestream sellers, and unregulated affiliate marketing schemes proliferated in that gap, and consumers had thin recourse when a platform simply hosted a bad actor. Joint liability is a blunt instrument, but it directly answers the collective-action problem regulators everywhere cite: platforms that bear no downside from hosting fraud have weak incentive to police it. Seller verification through VNeID and mandatory livestreamer authentication likewise respond to a real phenomenon — Vietnam's livestream-commerce boom has been a documented vector for both counterfeit sales and tax evasion.
Where proportionality breaks down
The law's flaw is not its goal but its allocation of cost. A 100,000-transaction threshold sounds targeted at large operators, but for a cross-border marketplace testing the Vietnamese market, it forces a choice between an expensive local-entity setup or a bank deposit of undefined size before a single decree spells out the number. That is a barrier to entry dressed as a compliance requirement, and it disproportionately protects incumbents already resident in Vietnam over new entrants — the opposite of the competitive dynamism a fast-growing digital economy should want to encourage.
Joint liability compounds the problem when its scope is undefined. The law does not yet specify a due-diligence safe harbor: a platform that verifies sellers, runs takedowns within 24 hours, and still hosts a counterfeit listing has no clear statutory shelter from co-liability. Absent that carve-out, the rational platform response is over-removal — pulling borderline listings preemptively rather than risk shared liability, which drags legitimate small sellers and livestreamers down with bad actors. The EU's Digital Services Act and India's 2021 IT Rules both wrestled with this exact tension and ultimately built explicit safe harbors conditioned on diligence; Vietnam's Q4 2026 decree cycle is the moment to import that lesson rather than relitigate it after enforcement begins.
What to watch
The test of whether this law is proportionate regulation or protectionism in a compliance wrapper will be written in the decrees still pending, not in the statute already in force. If the administrative-penalty rules due later this year define a genuine safe harbor for diligent platforms and set a modest, published deposit figure for exempted foreign operators, Vietnam will have built a workable, evidence-based framework for a market that earned one. If those decrees instead leave joint liability open-ended and the entity threshold effectively mandatory, the law will function less as consumer protection and more as a tariff on foreign platforms trying to compete with domestic incumbents already inside the compliance perimeter.