Glossary/Marketplace fees
What is marketplace fees?
Marketplace fees are the costs a platform charges or passes to a seller on each order: category commission, transaction or payment processing fees, the seller-funded share of vouchers and free-shipping programmes, service or programme fees for optional tiers such as Mall or fulfilment services, and cashback or coin issuance where the seller carries part of the cost. They vary by category, by seller tier, by campaign window, and sometimes by individual order, which is why a single blended percentage applied across a catalogue produces systematically wrong margins on both the high-fee and low-fee ends.
01/Formula
Formula
Marketplace fees per order = commission (category %) + transaction fee (%)
+ seller-funded voucher share
+ seller-funded shipping subsidy
+ programme and service fees
+ seller-funded cashback or coinsExample
A ฿1,000 Shopee order. commission ฿55 transaction / payment fee ฿20 seller-funded voucher ฿50 free-shipping subsidy ฿30 total fees ฿155, or 15.5% of order value On a SKU with 30% gross margin, fees consume just over half the margin before a single baht of advertising is spent.
02/In detail
Why can two identical orders carry different fees?
Because most of the stack is conditional. Commission depends on the product category and on whether the shop is a Mall seller. The seller-funded share of a voucher depends on which voucher the buyer applied and how the campaign was co-funded. The free-shipping subsidy depends on whether the order qualified and on the shipping method chosen at checkout. Programme fees depend on which optional tiers the shop is enrolled in that month. Two orders for the same SKU at the same price can therefore settle differently, which is why per-order reconstruction beats any per-SKU fee assumption, however carefully the assumption was derived.
Which fees do sellers most often miss?
The seller-funded ones, because they arrive as a reduction in payout rather than as a line labelled “fee”. Co-funded platform vouchers, the seller share of free-shipping programmes, and cashback or coin issuance all reduce settlement without appearing in the commission schedule the seller memorised at onboarding. Returns are the other systematic omission: a returned order usually leaves the seller with the outbound and sometimes the inbound shipping cost, plus handling and any unsellable stock, and shops that reconcile only completed orders never see it. Together these two categories account for most of the gap between a shop’s modelled margin and its bank statement.
How do you verify your fee model is right?
Reconcile against settlement, not against the fee schedule. Take a completed payout period, sum what the model predicted the platform would deduct, and compare it against what the platform actually deducted. A model within a percent or so of settlement can be trusted for decisions; one that is consistently off in the same direction has a missing line item rather than noise, and the sign tells you where to look. Doing this once per platform per quarter catches programme changes, which arrive without announcement and shift the whole cost base.
03/Why it matters
The trap, in one paragraph.
Marketplace fees are typically the largest cost after COGS, and unlike COGS they are scattered across several places in the seller dashboard and reported at different times. Sellers who do not model them per order overstate profit systematically — often by five to ten percentage points of margin — and, because the error is a percentage of revenue, it grows exactly as the shop scales.
Common mistake
Applying one blended fee rate to the whole catalogue. Commission alone varies by category and by seller tier, and the seller-funded promotional share varies by campaign. A blended rate is right on average and wrong on every individual SKU, which is fatal for a metric whose entire purpose is to rank SKUs against each other.
04/In DataGlass
How Marketplace fees is used in DataGlass.
DataGlass reconstructs the fee stack on each order from platform order and settlement data across Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop, so per-order economics and per-SKU contribution reflect what the platform actually deducted rather than a schedule-derived estimate.
05/Sources
- [1] Shopee Thailand — seller commission and fee schedule
Commission bands that vary by category and by Mall status, transaction fees, and Shop Voucher mechanics.
- [2] Shopee Thailand — Free Shipping Programme
The conditions under which the seller carries part of the free-shipping subsidy.
- [3] Shopee Thailand — Shopee Coins and Cashback
How coin issuance and cashback costs are split between platform and seller.