Your Own Website vs Shopee, Lazada, and Amazon — Which is Better for Singapore SMEs?

What you are actually building on a marketplace

When you open a Shopee or Lazada store, you are renting space in someone else's shopping centre. The foot traffic is real, the setup is fast, and sales can come quickly. But everything you build there — your reviews, your follower count, your sales history — belongs to the platform. The day you stop paying commissions or the platform changes its algorithm, you start from zero. You are not building a business asset. You are building someone else's.

The fee reality

Marketplace fees are easy to underestimate. Shopee and Lazada charge a commission on every sale — typically between 1% and 6% depending on your category. Add payment processing fees, and then add what you spend on in-platform advertising just to stay visible among thousands of competing listings. For many sellers, the real cost of a marketplace sale is 15% to 25% of revenue by the time everything is counted. On your own website, you pay a flat monthly platform fee and keep the rest.

The customer data problem

This is the one most sellers do not think about until it is too late. When someone buys from you on Shopee, you do not get their email address. You cannot message them directly. You cannot build a loyalty programme, send them a promotion, or invite them back without going through the marketplace again — and paying for the privilege. Every customer you win on a marketplace stays the marketplace's customer. On your own website, every customer is yours. Their contact details, their purchase history, their preferences — all of it belongs to you.

Side by side

How Google and AI search treats marketplace listings differently

Your Shopee listing lives on the shopee.sg domain — shared with millions of other sellers. Google allocates a crawl budget to shopee.sg as a whole, which means your individual listing is competing for attention with every other product on the platform. An AI tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity reading Shopee sees a marketplace, not your business specifically.

Your own website is a dedicated presence on its own domain. Google and AI engines index it as your business — with your name, your products, your location, and your story. When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, a dedicated business website is far more likely to be cited by name than a marketplace listing buried among thousands of competitors.

When marketplaces still make sense

Being honest matters here. Marketplaces are genuinely useful for discovery — getting in front of people who have never heard of you. If you are just starting out and have no audience, Shopee and Lazada can generate your first sales faster than waiting for Google to rank a new website. There is nothing wrong with using them at the right stage.

The mistake is staying dependent on them. The smartest approach most successful Singapore sellers use is this: use the marketplace to get found, use your own website to build the relationship. Direct first-time buyers to your Shopee store. Once they buy, bring them back through your own website where you keep more margin and own the connection.

What you are building long-term

A Shopee store with 500 reviews is an asset on Shopee's platform. A business with its own website, its own customer list, and its own Google presence is an asset you own outright. Five years from now, if you decide to sell your business, raise investment, or pivot your offer, a real web presence is worth something. A marketplace store account is worth nothing outside the platform.

The practical starting point

You do not have to choose one or the other from day one. Start your own website now — it takes 15 minutes on LaunchSteady and costs less than a single Shopee ad campaign. Run both in parallel. Over time, as your own site builds Google authority and your customer list grows, you will naturally rely on the marketplace less. That is not a strategy you can execute in reverse.