Is Shopee still worth it in 2026? An honest look at rising fees for Malaysian brands

Spend ten minutes in any Malaysian seller group and you'll feel it: the fees are up again, margins are tighter, and someone is asking whether Shopee is even worth it anymore. The frustration is real and fair. But "is it worth it?" is the wrong question to answer with a feeling — so let's answer it properly, from both sides.

Why every seller is frustrated

Shopee, like most marketplaces that reach maturity, has seen the total cost of selling drift upward over the years — higher commissions in some categories, more programs to opt into, and a growing need to advertise just to stay visible. Put together, the platform quietly takes a bigger slice of each sale than it did a few years ago. That's a genuine squeeze, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

Here's a pattern worth noticing, though: a lot of the loudest "it's too expensive" comes from sellers who've never run another channel — no offline retail, no distributor experience — so they've never seen that other channels routinely cost more. Without that reference point, a marketplace fee feels like a uniquely unfair tax rather than what it actually is: a normal cost of distribution.

Because a rising cost only tells you half the story. A cost is only "too high" relative to what it returns. So before deciding, look honestly at both doors.

Option A — if you leave Shopee, where do you go?

Say you walk. Your brand still needs somewhere to sell. Every alternative has its own cost and its own catch:

Notice the pattern: none of these is free. Leaving Shopee doesn't remove channel cost — it just swaps one cost structure for another, and often trades the marketplace's ready-made demand for the far harder job of generating your own.

A word on going private — and the order that matters

Building your own private domain — a webstore, your own audience, direct customer relationships — is a genuinely good idea. For a brand that wants to last, we don't just allow it, we recommend it: private domain is where the real profit lives, and where you build the kind of deep trust with customers that a marketplace never lets you own.

But the sequence matters. Going straight to private domain from day one isn't impossible — it just multiplies the time, money and effort you need up front, because you're generating every ounce of demand yourself:

• Driving your own traffic — nobody hands you demand.
• Retaining customers and building the trust that makes them buy again.
• Daily social-media presence.
• SEO, GEO and AEO so you're found across search and AI engines.
• Recruiting influencers and affiliates to share, expose and vouch for you — then converting that attention.
• And after all that: repurchase, referral and word-of-mouth loops.

The smarter path is a sequence, not a leap: use the public marketplaces first — Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop already hold the traffic and the buying habit — then, through the sales you make there (an after-sales card in the parcel, for instance), gradually funnel those customers into a private domain you own. Public domain builds the base; private domain is where it pays off. Skip the base and the climb only gets steeper.

Option B — if you stay, why Shopee still makes sense

Set the fees aside for a moment and remember what you're actually renting:

• Concentrated demand. Shopee is where a huge share of Malaysian buyers already are, already searching, already ready to buy. That demand is expensive to build anywhere else.
• Discovery & trust. The search, reviews and ratings ecosystem does the trust-building that a cold webstore has to earn from scratch.
• Logistics & payments, solved. Integrated shipping, returns and payment rails you'd otherwise have to stitch together yourself.
• Cash flow. A steady stream of orders and payouts that funds the rest of your growth.

That bundle is exactly what the fee pays for. The question is never whether it's free — it's whether that bundle still earns its keep for your product.

The reframe that changes the question

Here's the shift that settles most of the argument: a marketplace is one channel, not your business. And channels have always cost money — long before e-commerce existed.

Put a product on a supermarket shelf and you'll meet listing fees, barcode fees, promoter costs and a distributor or consignment margin that often runs 20–40% of the price — plus you carry the risk of unsold stock. Against that backdrop, a marketplace commission isn't a strange new tax; it's the online version of a channel cost you'd pay in any retail world. Sellers feel marketplace fees more sharply only because the platform shows them the number on every order.

And brands pay those offline costs willingly, because a channel buys more than sales — it buys strategic position. Some products need a physical channel so a customer can feel the texture, catch the scent, hold the thing in their hands — and that experience is what builds the brand's image and sets it apart from competitors. That's the part most brands won't tell you: they're not paying for shelf space, they're paying for what the channel does for the brand. Judge an online channel the same way — not only on the orders it books, but on the position it builds.

From the founder

Let me be blunt: in Malaysia the online game is basically Shopee, TikTok and Lazada. They carry enormous built-in traffic — and yes, brutal competition. People ask me if they can skip them and just build their own private domain instead. You can, and for the right brand I recommend it — but as I said, that's more work, not less, and the order matters.

So can you still ‘do’ these platforms? You don't really have a choice — you have to. Treat them the way you'd treat Parkson, Aeon or Lotus's: they're channels you operate, not a shop you ‘open’ once and walk away from. The seller who thinks ‘I made an account, so I have a store’ has it wrong — on these platforms you're actively running a position, not parking a shopfront.

And yes — I know how this sounds coming from someone who runs these channels for a living. So let me be straight: we don't tell every brand to pour everything into marketplaces. We study each brand and give a customized call — sometimes it's Shopee-first, sometimes private-domain-first, usually a sequence of both. The honest answer depends on your product, not on what's convenient for us.

— Louis Teo, Founder of Hansen

It's telling that the biggest brands in the world — Nike among them — still open and run stores on these marketplaces. They hardly need Shopee for credibility; they're there for the simplest reason of all: that's where the buyers are. If you're serious about building a brand, these search-driven platforms aren't optional.

So how do you actually decide?

Stop asking "are the fees too high?" and start asking a contribution question: after the full cost stack, does each order still leave a profit you're happy with — and does the channel still put my brand in front of buyers I couldn't reach as cheaply elsewhere? If yes, the fee is doing its job. If no, the fix is usually pricing, positioning or operations — not fleeing the demand. And when you diversify, do it as a deliberate step (our platform comparison shows how to pick the next channel), not a panic exit.