↳ Solutions · Where the money goes
Losing money on Shopee — the leaks a fee calculator cannot see
A Shopee seller on Pantip, one year in: “ขาย1400฿ shopee หักไป 360 บาท เหลือ1060฿ กำไรเรา60 บาท” — sold THB 1,400, Shopee deducted THB 360, THB 1,060 came back, THB 60 of it was profit.[1] That THB 360 is the part a calculator can model. On Shopee Thailand's current schedule — Sale Transaction Fee of 7.49–17.12% including VAT for non-Mall sellers, effective 4 August 2026, plus a 3.21% Payment Transaction Fee and THB 1 per completed order — the modellable deduction on a fashion SKU is about 21% of what the buyer paid.[2][3]
Every Thai Shopee fee calculator we could find prices exactly that: one order, at list price, against the published fee table. It is arithmetic, and it is correct. It is also the smaller half of the problem. Six further costs — seller-funded vouchers, affiliate commission, the shipping the shop absorbs, returns and the freight back, cost-of-goods drift, and ad spend that bought orders the shop was going to get anyway — are properties of a month, not of an order. No single-order calculator can see any of them, which is why sellers who have checked their numbers still end the month short.
The fee schedule is the part you can look up. The part that decides whether the month was profitable is spread across four hundred orders and never appears on any one of them.
What the calculator does see
Shopee Thailand publishes its Sale Transaction Fee per product category, VAT included, charged on the listed item price minus the seller-funded discount. The schedule in force took effect on 4 August 2026 and runs 7.49% to 17.12% for non-Mall sellers and 7.49% to 19.26% for Shopee Mall. Fashion sits near the top: Women Clothes is 17.12% for a non-Mall shop.[2] That schedule is recent — of 1,437 leaf categories, 1,382 rose by 2 percentage points before VAT on that date, 20 rose by 1 point, and 35 were unchanged.[3] Any Thai page still quoting the June schedule is quoting a superseded document.
Two more lines are flat and knowable: a Payment Transaction Fee of 3.21% including VAT (3.00% before VAT) on every standard payment method since 7 April 2026, and a Platform Infrastructure Fee of THB 1 before VAT on every completed order.[4] Add the three and a THB 550 fashion order gives up about THB 113 before a single unit of stock is paid for. That is the honest ceiling of what a fee calculator can tell you.
The same month, all the way down
One SKU, one month, a non-Mall fashion shop. Listed at THB 590 with a THB 40 on-listing discount, landed cost THB 280, 400 orders shipped. Fee rates are the published ones; the shop-side figures are illustrative assumptions, stated so you can substitute your own.
List price THB 590 x 400 orders = 236,000
- on-listing discount (THB 40) - 16,000
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Buyer paid 220,000
WHAT THE CALCULATOR SEES
- Sale Transaction Fee 17.12% - 37,664
- Payment Transaction Fee 3.21% - 7,062
- Platform Infrastructure Fee THB 1.07 x 400 - 428
- COGS THB 280 x 400 - 112,000
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
"Profit", per the calculator 62,846 (28.6%)
WHAT IT DOES NOT SEE
- shop vouchers THB 30, redeemed on 180 orders - 5,400
- affiliate commission 8% on 96 orders - 4,224
- shipping the shop absorbs THB 25 x 400 - 10,000
- returns, 9% (36 orders)
freight back + handling THB 70 x 36 - 2,520
20% of returned units unsellable - 2,016
- COGS drift: landed cost up THB 18 since July - 7,200
- ad spend - 28,000
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
What reached the bank 3,486 (1.6%)The calculator was not wrong. It answered the question it was asked — what does Shopee deduct from this order — and it answered it to the baht. The gap between 28.6% and 1.6% is entirely made of costs that do not attach to a single order, and therefore cannot be typed into a single-order form.
The six leaks, named and sized
- 1
Seller-funded vouchers
Shop vouchers are deducted from the shop, not from Shopee, and they are redeemed by a subset of orders — so the cost per order is a redemption rate, not a rate you set. In the month above, a THB 30 voucher redeemed on 45% of orders costs THB 13.50 per order on average. Campaign windows raise both the tier and the redemption rate at the same time, which is what makes 9.9 and 11.11 months look strange afterwards.
- 2
Affiliate commission
Affiliate-attributed orders carry a commission on top of the platform fee, paid to the creator. It is the one leak that scales with your best-performing traffic: the more affiliate orders you win, the larger the share of the month it eats. Because it lands as a separate settlement line rather than an order-level deduction, it is routinely missing from per-order margin sheets entirely.
- 3
Shipping the shop absorbs
The seller-borne share of the shipping subsidy is per-order, small, and constant — which is exactly why it is skipped. THB 25 per order on 400 orders is THB 10,000, roughly three times the profit the month actually produced. Free-shipping programme enrolment changes this number without changing anything visible on the listing.
- 4
Returns and the freight back
A return reverses the sale, but not the cost of having made it. The outbound and return legs are both spent, the handling time is spent, and a share of returned units comes back unsellable. At a 9% return rate the direct cost above is THB 4,536 — but the more damaging effect is that returns are excluded from the order count most sellers use for their margin maths, so the per-order margin they compute is calculated on a denominator that never happened.
- 5
COGS drift
Landed cost moves — supplier price, freight, packaging, the exchange rate — and the number in the margin sheet does not move with it. A THB 18 drift on a THB 280 cost is 6.4%, invisible on any single order and THB 7,200 across the month. This is the leak that survives longest, because nothing in the platform ever contradicts it: Shopee has no opinion about what your goods cost.
- 6
Ad spend that bought orders you already had
Shopee credits an ad with the revenue of orders that followed a click. Some of those buyers would have bought anyway — they searched your brand, or they were returning. The share that would not have bought is the incrementality, and it is the number that turns reported ROAS into a decision. At 60% incrementality, a campaign reporting 5.0 ROAS is really running at 3.0, and the gap is spend that changed nothing.
Where this breaks down
- The three fee lines have different calculation bases. Sale Transaction Fee is charged on the listed price minus the seller-funded discount; Payment Transaction Fee is charged on order value plus shipping fee plus Shopee-funded discount plus Shopee Coins. The worked example applies both to the amount the buyer paid, which is close enough to show the shape and wrong in the third digit. Read your own settlement file for the exact bases.
- The shop-side figures — THB 280 landed cost, THB 40 on-listing discount, 45% voucher redemption, 24% affiliate share, 9% return rate, THB 25 shipping share — are illustrative assumptions chosen to be typical of a Thai fashion shop, not measurements across accounts. Change any one of them and the last line moves substantially. The point of the example is the structure, not the 1.6%.
- Who bears the cost of return freight depends on the return reason and on Shopee's own allocation, and it varies by category and by programme enrolment. The example assumes the shop bears it. On some return reasons it does not.
- Below roughly THB 200,000 monthly revenue, reconstructing this from order-line data costs more effort than it recovers. A fixed variable-cost assumption per category, refreshed quarterly, is a better starting point at that scale.
- Incrementality cannot be read off the Shopee dashboard. The only honest way to estimate it is a holdout — turn a campaign off in a controlled way and measure what happens to orders. Assuming a number is better than assuming 100%, but it is still an assumption.
The budget question this raises has its own page: How much should you spend on Shopee Ads.
To put your own numbers through the break-even arithmetic, including the incrementality slider: break-even ROAS calculator.
↳ Methodology
Every fee rate on this page comes from the DataGlass Marketplace Fee Dataset (v2026.08.25, last verified 25 August 2026), which transcribes Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop Thailand fee schedules from each platform's own dated documentation. A rate ships only when it comes from the platform's own site, that page carries a date, the VAT treatment is stated by the source rather than inferred, and a human has opened the source and read the number. The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0 and is machine-readable.
The order-level figures in the worked example — landed cost, discount, voucher redemption rate, affiliate share, return rate, shipping share, ad spend — are illustrative assumptions, labelled as such, and are not aggregates from DataGlass customer accounts. Nothing on this page claims a measured profit lift; the arithmetic shows a structure, and the structure is the claim.
Sources
- Pantip — Thai Shopee seller thread: one year selling, sold THB 1,400, Shopee deducted THB 360, THB 60 profit. pantip.com/topic/44143055
- Shopee Thailand — Fee Policy and the Sale Transaction Fee schedule by category, effective 4 August 2026 (7.49–17.12% non-Mall, 7.49–19.26% Shopee Mall, VAT included). help.shopee.co.th
- DataGlass Marketplace Fee Dataset (Thailand), v2026.08.25 — dated change log: 1,382 of 1,437 Shopee leaf categories up 2 percentage points before VAT on 4 August 2026. CC BY 4.0. /research/marketplace-fees
- Shopee Thailand Seller Education Hub — Payment Transaction Fee, 3.21% including VAT (3.00% before VAT), effective 7 April 2026. seller.shopee.co.th
- Operator articles that go deeper on individual lines: Shopee fee structure in 2026, Calculate true Shopee ROAS, Find low-margin SKUs on Shopee.
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