Technology
A 1 per cent fee will be applied on all successful transactions by sellers based in Singapore, says a company spokesperson.
Screengrab of Shopee’s e-commerce portal.
SINGAPORE: Shopee, the e-commerce site by Singapore tech firm Sea, will begin charging sellers a 1 per cent transaction fee for all successful orders beginning next month.
An email was sent out on Wednesday (Jul 11) to notify users of this new charge. Details of what the transaction fee entails can also be found under Shopee’s Help Centre section.
The company told Channel NewsAsia in a statement that the 1 per cent transaction fee is for processing and handling payments, and that Shopee remains a zero-commission platform. It is applicable to sellers based in Singapore from Aug 1, following on the heels of Taiwan last year.
The fee will be applied on all successful transactions through bank transfers, credit card and Shopee Wallet payments, its website stated.
An email was sent to Shopee sellers to notify them of the impending change in fees.
“While the charging of transaction fees is an industry-wide standard, Shopee made sure to only introduce it at a point where we felt our users were ready,” the company said.
“The move to introduce transaction fees at this point in time highlights our shift in focus from merely growing the platform to building a more sustainable e-commerce ecosystem for our users in the long run, and also further cements our position as an established e-commerce player in the market.”
It also emphasised its range of free services for sellers, including free listing and shipping. These have been “very well received” and there are no plans to stop them, it said.
Shopee has more than 1.5 million users in Singapore, the company said.
Rival platforms, too, impose fees on sellers through a variety of methods. Qoo10, for instance, charged a range between 7 per cent and 12 per cent of the total transaction amount depending on the item’s price and seller grade.
Shopee is part of US-listed company Sea, which announced in June it had raised US$575 million (S$780.2 million) in fresh funds that it intended to use for business expansion and other general corporate purposes, including to support the growth of its e-commerce platform.
The company, formerly known as Garena, reported a net loss of US$216.2 million for its first quarter this year, nearly triple the loss it logged in the same period last year.
