From Shopee to Your Own Website: Why Indonesian Sellers Are Making the Switch

If you’re selling on Shopee or Tokopedia today, you already know the math is getting harder.

Commission rates have increased steadily over the past three years. Shopee’s standard seller commission now sits at 3–6% per transaction, higher for certain categories. Add payment gateway fees, and you’re looking at 5–9% off the top before you’ve spent a single rupiah on ads.

Then there’s the ads problem. Organic reach on Shopee was viable until around 2022. Now, the algorithm heavily favors paid listings. If you’re not running Shopee Ads, you’re invisible to anyone who isn’t searching for your brand name specifically. The cost to stay visible has become a fixed operating expense — not optional, not recoverable.

This is the model. Marketplaces need to monetize their traffic, and seller fees are how they do it. There’s no malice in it. But understanding the model helps you decide how much of your business to build on top of it.

What You Own vs What You Rent

A marketplace store is rented shelf space. The terms are set by someone else, and they can change.

In 2021, several Tokopedia sellers had their stores suspended without warning after policy updates. In 2023, Shopee rolled out new product category rules that forced hundreds of small sellers to relist their entire catalog. The platform holds the relationship with the customer — you fulfill the order, but Shopee owns the data, the reviews, and the repeat purchase.

Your own website is different. The customer email is yours. The purchase history is yours. You can send a follow-up message, offer a loyalty discount, or announce a new product — without paying a platform for the privilege.

This isn’t a hypothetical advantage. It’s the reason direct-to-consumer brands exist. The customer relationship compounds over time. On a marketplace, every repeat purchase feels like an acquisition because the customer found you through Shopee again, and Shopee took its cut again.

The Real Advantages of Your Own Store

Zero commission. Every sale goes to you, minus payment gateway fees (typically 1–2% with Midtrans or Xendit), which are far lower than marketplace commission.

WhatsApp checkout. Indonesian buyers are comfortable with this. A product page with a WhatsApp order button can convert extremely well, especially for high-consideration purchases where the buyer has questions. You own that conversation.

Price flexibility. On marketplaces, you’re often forced into flash sales and platform-mandated discounts. On your own site, you control pricing strategy.

Brand perception. A well-designed website signals legitimacy in a way that a marketplace storefront cannot. For business-to-business sales, wholesale buyers, or premium products, your own site is often table stakes.

SEO. Your own site can rank in Google. A Shopee listing can too, but you’re building Shopee’s domain authority, not your own. Long-term, organic search traffic to your own domain is an asset.

The Common Objection

“But Shopee already has the traffic.”

This is true, and it matters. A brand-new website has zero visitors until you build or buy traffic. Shopee has 130 million monthly active users. That’s a real moat.

The answer isn’t to abandon Shopee. The answer is to use each channel for what it’s good at.

Running Both — The Right Way

Marketplaces are discovery engines. Buyers browse, compare, and find new brands there. Your own website is where you capture long-term value once someone knows who you are.

A practical setup:

• Use Shopee and Tokopedia for reach and new customer acquisition
• Drive repeat buyers to your own website through packaging inserts, WhatsApp broadcast, or the order confirmation message
• Offer something on your own site that the marketplace can’t: wholesale pricing, bundle deals, subscription, exclusive products

Once a buyer has ordered through your site once, the economics shift. They’re in your system. You can re-market to them directly, for free.

The sellers making this transition most successfully aren’t treating it as “leaving the marketplace.” They’re treating it as expanding their distribution — while shifting their best customers to a channel they actually own.

What This Looks Like in Practice

One of the businesses we worked with at Pelita Studio was running their online sales entirely through marketplaces. We built them a custom e-commerce site with WhatsApp checkout, a product catalog that matched their Shopee store, and a simple way for their repeat buyers to order directly.

Within three months, 20–30% of their repeat orders were coming through the website — at zero commission. The marketplace stayed active for discovery. The website handled everything else.

You can see a similar setup at pelitafortune.com, one of our live client builds.

If you’re at the stage where marketplace fees are eating your margins and you want to understand what it would take to build your own channel alongside it, we’re happy to walk through what that looks like for your specific business.