Own Online Store vs Shopee and Lazada in Singapore

Short answer: Shopee and Lazada take roughly 10% to 20% of each Singapore order once commission, transaction fees and programme fees stack, based on dated 2026 guides. Your own store costs 1.3% to 3.9% per order in payment fees plus a fixed build and hosting cost, and the customer record is yours. Most sellers should run both: the marketplace for discovery, the store for repeat buyers and margin.

Marketplace fee figures below come from published third-party guides, because both platforms keep the live rate card behind the seller login. Each figure is dated. Confirm your own category in Seller Centre before deciding.

What do Shopee and Lazada charge sellers?

Both platforms charge a percentage of each completed order, in layers. Neither charges a listing or monthly fee on the basic marketplace tier.

Shopee Singapore publishes its fees in the Seller Education Hub, visible to logged-in sellers. Published guides give these figures:

For comparison, a Wise guide dated January 2023 listed 2% commission plus 2% transaction fee. The direction over 3 years is clear even where the current figures differ by source.

Lazada Singapore keeps its rate card in Seller Centre. Published guides give:

Both platforms also sell advertising, and most sellers with volume buy it. That cost sits on top of the fees above and is the item that pushes total platform cost past 20%.

What does your own store cost per order?

Your own store has two cost types: a per-order payment fee and a fixed cost for the store itself.

Per order, from Stripe's Singapore pricing, checked 17 October 2026:

• Domestic card: 3.4% plus S$0.50.
• International card: a further 0.5%, and 2% more if currency conversion applies.
• PayNow: 1.3%.
• GrabPay: 3.3%.

On a hosted platform, Shopify's Singapore plans are S$39 a month on Basic with online card rates of 3.2% plus S$0.50, or S$29 a month on yearly billing. See Shopify vs WooCommerce in Singapore for that comparison and payment gateways for websites in Singapore for the full gateway list.

The per-order comparison on a S$100 item, estimates:

The fixed cost decides the break-even. A custom store built once, with S$0 monthly maintenance, is amortised within the first year at 300 orders a month if each order saves S$10 in marketplace fees against the same sale on Shopee. At 30 orders a month the marketplace is cheaper for 2 to 3 years. Run your own numbers with your category's commission and your real order count.

Who owns the customer data on a marketplace?

On Shopee or Lazada, the buyer is the platform's customer. You receive the details needed to pack and ship the order, under the platform's seller terms, and the platform controls messaging, reviews, promotions and the account history. If your shop is suspended or you leave, the buyer list does not come with you.

On your own store:

• The order record, email, phone and address are in your database.
• You can email or message past buyers about restocks and new lines, with their consent.
• You can see repeat purchase rate, average order value and which products are bought together.
• You can price without a platform-wide campaign forcing a discount.

With ownership comes the duty. Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act applies to every customer record you hold: consent for marketing, purpose limitation, protection and retention limits. A store needs a privacy notice, consent for marketing and a retention rule written down. A marketplace handles most of that for you, which is part of what the fee pays for.

Can you run both?

Yes, and most Singapore sellers with their own store do. Online purchases were 15.7% of Singapore retail sales in August 2026 according to the Department of Statistics, and a large share of that passes through the two marketplaces. Leaving them means leaving the search box most shoppers open first.

A workable split:

• Marketplace: new customers, price-comparison shoppers, campaign days, products where you compete on price.
• Own store: repeat buyers, bundles and subscriptions, products with margin to protect, B2B or bulk orders, anything the marketplace category rules do not fit.

Operational points:

• One stock figure. Oversell is the first failure when two channels share inventory. Either the store and marketplace sync stock or you ring-fence quantities per channel.
• Price parity. Both marketplaces monitor off-platform pricing on the same product; check the current seller terms before pricing the store lower on identical SKUs. Bundles and store-only variants avoid the conflict.
• Packing insert. A card in every marketplace parcel with the store URL and a first-order code is the cheapest customer acquisition you will run.
• Same branding. The store should look like the brand the buyer saw on the marketplace, not a different company.

When should a seller move to its own site?

Move volume, not everything, and move it when these signals appear:

• Repeat purchase rate above 20% of monthly orders. Those buyers would come to you directly.
• Marketplace fees plus advertising above 20% of revenue for 3 consecutive months.
• A product range the category commission penalises, such as items in the highest tier.
• Customer questions you cannot answer on the platform: sizing guides, configuration, B2B quotes.
• A brand worth protecting, where the marketplace listing sits beside cheaper lookalikes.
• Suspension risk. A single account review that freezes payouts is reason enough to hold a second channel.

What the store needs on day one is smaller than most sellers assume: product pages that state price, variants, delivery time and returns; PayNow and card checkout; order emails; and a WhatsApp link for questions.

What cense does

cense builds e-commerce sites in Next.js where every order and enquiry lands in the client's own database, with the domain, code, hosting and data owned by the client and S$0 monthly maintenance. Website and infrastructure builds are quoted in full before work starts. See e-commerce website design in Singapore.