Indonesia is the largest e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, at around 37 percent of the region’s platform gross merchandise value (the total value of goods sold across a platform before any costs are taken out), and in 2025 it grew by 2.2 percent. Thailand grew by 51.8 percent in the same year and Malaysia by 47.6 percent. These figures come from the 2026 edition of Momentum Works’ annual report on Southeast Asian e-commerce, published in April 2026.
Three platforms took 98.8 percent of regional platform gross merchandise valuein 2025: Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop counted together with Tokopedia. Content commerce, meaning live selling and short-form video, generated an estimated USD 49.7 billion and accounted for 32 percent of all platform gross merchandise value, up from 20 percent a year earlier.
Sellers come to us looking for the platform that will sell the most for them, wherever the buyers are, often with Shopify or Amazon already in mind, and without knowing whether either would work for their business. Answering that requires knowing where the buyers actually are, what it takes to reach more of them, what each route costs to run, and which of them a business like theirs can afford to own.
Where the buyers are
Most of the buyers are on three applications, where Shopee takes around 53 percent of regional platform gross merchandise value and ranks first in all six major Southeast Asian markets. TikTok Shop, counted with Tokopedia, which ByteDance took control of in December 2023, has grown quickly against it, and Indonesia is TikTok Shop’s largest market in the region. Lazada is third in Indonesia, and between them the three take almost the whole of the platform market, and the single-country marketplaces have been leaving it, with Bukalapak withdrawing from physical goods in February 2025.
The content commerce figure quoted above is regional rather than Indonesian, and Momentum Works does not break it out by country, so treat it as the direction of travel rather than as an Indonesian statistic. The practical consequence for a seller is the same either way. A product listing with no live or video selling behind it competes for a diminishing portion of platform demand, and TikTok Shop’s growth is the principal reason for that.
The buyers in Indonesia are numerous and the competition for them is now intense, while the buyers whose numbers are rising fastest are across the border, in Thailand and Malaysia. Selling more inside Indonesia in 2026 means taking share from a competitor, since the market is no longer growing fast enough to raise every seller with it.
Non-platform channels, which include sellers’ own websites, took an estimated USD 27.8 billion across the region in 2025, and platforms dropped from 89 percent of total e-commerce to 85 percent. Your own store is a channel gaining share while the three platforms consolidate around each other.
Amazon operates no Indonesian marketplace. Selling on Amazon from Indonesia means exporting, through Amazon Global Selling, into amazon.com and its sibling sites. The buyer is American and pays an American price for a product that sells in Indonesia for a fraction of it.
How you sell more
On a marketplace, you sell more by playing the platform’s game. You rank, you enter the campaign, you accept the discount that keeps you visible, and you appear in the content format the platform is promoting. The buyers already exist, payment works in rupiah through methods they trust, and delivery is handled by couriers already integrated. A new seller can open a shop in an afternoon and receive an order the same week, without a website, a card processor, or a single advertisement.
What the marketplace keeps is the relationship with the buyer, along with the buyer’s identity, the search ranking, the promotional calendar, and the ability to place a competitor above you on the page where your customer is looking. The seller supplies goods and service into somebody else’s system, and the platform records that supply as a service it can source elsewhere.
From 1 August 2026 the marketplace also collects your income tax. Under Peraturan Menteri Keuangan Nomor 37 Tahun 2025 (PMK 37/2025, Minister of Finance Regulation 37 of 2025), the Directorate General of Taxes appointed Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Blibli as collectors on 1 July 2026, and Article 17 gives an appointed platform one month before collection begins.
An appointed platform withholds Pajak Penghasilan Pasal 22 (PPh 22, Article 22 income tax) at 0.5 percent of gross turnover, excluding Pajak Pertambahan Nilai (PPN, value added tax), at the moment the buyer’s payment reaches the platform rather than when the goods arrive. The amount is creditable against income tax for the year, so it changes when a seller pays rather than how much. The exemption for turnover up to Rp. 500 million applies to individual taxpayers who file a declaration with the platform. A PT is a company rather than an individual, so a PT PMDN selling through an appointed marketplace is collected from on the first rupiah.
Two consequences follow for a seller choosing a channel now. Cash arriving from those four platforms is 0.5 percent lighter from August, which has to appear in the working-capital model rather than as a surprise in the settlement statement. And TikTok Shop is not among the four appointed platforms, so the same sale made there is not collected at source, which is a timing difference rather than a tax saving, and the list is expected to grow.
Margin is limited by the same logic, which our article on supply chain control sets out in full: a domestic operator inside a joint venture is replaced once its contribution is recorded as a service rather than owned as an asset, and the protection is to own the part of the chain the other parties cannot replace. The same logic operates on a marketplace, where a seller who owns nothing except the goods can be replaced by any seller offering those goods at a lower price, and the platform loses nothing by the substitution. Volume rises and margin does not, because the party that owns the route to market sets the terms across it.
Selling more, in the sense that raises what the business is worth rather than only its revenue, therefore requires owning a route the platform cannot close. That is what your own store, or an export channel, actually buys you.
The licence has to match the channel
Selling online in Indonesia is a regulated trading activity rather than an extension of marketing. Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 80 Tahun 2019 (PP 80/2019, Government Regulation 80 of 2019) governs Perdagangan Melalui Sistem Elektronik (PMSE, trade through electronic systems), and Peraturan Menteri Perdagangan Nomor 31 Tahun 2023 (Permendag 31/2023) sets the licensing, advertising, guidance, and supervision rules for the businesses operating in it. A company selling through a marketplace, and a company selling through its own website, are both business actors in PMSE, and both need business licensing that matches what they actually sell.
Licensing runs through the risk-based system, now governed by Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 28 Tahun 2025 (PP 28/2025), which revoked the previous framework on 5 June 2025 and widened it from sixteen sectors to twenty-two. One of the six sectors added is the operation of electronic systems and transactions. The Klasifikasi Baku Lapangan Usaha (KBLI, Indonesian Standard Industrial Classification) code on the Online Single Submission (OSS) system must describe the real activity, and KBLI 4791 covers retail trade by mail order or internet, divided into subcategories by product type.
Running your own transactional store raises a further question, because retail online is one of the business models a Penyelenggara Perdagangan Melalui Sistem Elektronik (PPMSE, electronic commerce operator) can take, so a company selling from its own website may be operating the platform as well as trading on it, and should establish whether it must register as a Penyelenggara Sistem Elektronik (PSE, electronic system operator). Buyer data collected through that store is governed by Undang-Undang Nomor 27 Tahun 2022 (UU 27/2022, the Personal Data Protection Law), which applies to the seller as controller of the data rather than to the software vendor.
A marketplace account answers none of this. The platform verifies you as a merchant, and it does not licence your business, classify your activity, or approve your product.
What will work for you
Sellers who grow use several platforms at once, and the useful question is which route among them they intend to own.
Marketplaces supply volume, discovery, delivery, and cash flow, and they should be used for exactly that. An own-brand store supplies margin, the customer list, and a business that can be sold. An export channel supplies a buyer who pays in a stronger currency. The mistake is treating the marketplace as the whole business, because a seller whose entire demand is rented can be repriced at any time by the party renting it.
The obstacles an Indonesian business meets on each route are named below rather than dissected, and the detailed mechanics are the subject of a separate article.
Shopify
Shopify sells software for running your own shop, on your own domain, with your own customer list. Nobody ranks you against a rival and no campaign calendar sets your discount, and in exchange no buyer comes to the store of their own accord, so every visitor must be found and paid for. Store Leads, a crawler that indexes e-commerce platforms, counted 4,181 live Shopify stores in Indonesia at the fourth quarter of 2025, of which 77 ran on Shopify Plus.
Two exclusions decide whether Shopify works for an Indonesian seller, and the first is payment. Shopify Payments, the payment product Shopify sells its own merchants, operates in thirty-nine countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and most of the European Union. Indonesia is not among them. Stripe does not fill that gap, since its own documentation states that accounts based in Indonesia have not supported e-commerce plug-ins, with Shopify named among them. An Indonesia-based store therefore uses a local gateway such as Xendit or Midtrans, which serves Indonesian buyers well and does not produce the international card checkout an overseas customer expects. Shopify also applies a surcharge on every sale made through a third-party gateway, so the exclusion is a permanent cost rather than an inconvenience.
Shopify Capital, the funding Shopify advances to its merchants, is offered in nine countries and Indonesia is absent from the list. The eligibility rules require the principal place of business and the bank account to be located inside a supported country, with repayment running through Shopify Payments, so an Indonesian-domiciled seller is excluded on three separate grounds rather than one. A foreign-owned PT PMA is excluded on the same basis, because eligibility follows where the business is located rather than who owns the shares.
For a seller whose customers are Indonesian, neither exclusion prevents anything. For a brand selling to Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, or the United States, the payment exclusion is the whole question, and the answer usually involves an entity abroad, which brings obligations of its own. We set those out in our article on opening an offshore company from Indonesia.
Amazon
Amazon does not create the exclusion that Shopify does, which contradicts the common assumption that selling internationally always requires an entity abroad. Amazon pays its sellers through the Amazon Currency Converter for Sellers, which converts the proceeds and deposits them into the seller’s own local bank account, and Amazon’s own material states that a seller does not need a foreign bank account or a third-party payment service to be paid.
The obstacle on Amazon is operational rather than structural. Registration requires a seller account for the destination marketplace, an internationally chargeable card, a bank arrangement able to receive foreign currency, and identity verification to that marketplace’s standard. The product must satisfy the destination country’s rules on safety, labelling, packaging, and category restriction rather than Indonesia’s. Export documentation must be prepared, customs cleared, and duty paid. Where Fulfilment by Amazon is used, the stock must reach a warehouse in the destination country, shipped and cleared at the seller’s expense, before a single unit sells, and returns are received there rather than in Indonesia.
Stock in a warehouse in California is money already spent and not yet earned, and the period between paying for it and being paid for it is far longer than in a domestic sale. The export channel demands the most working capital at exactly the point where the cheapest funding is hardest to obtain.
The money
Credit is offered to Indonesian sellers inside the applications they already use, and the identity of the lender is set out in the terms rather than on the screen where the offer is made. SPinjam untuk Penjual (SPinjam for Sellers, the seller lending facility inside the Shopee application) is not funded by Shopee. Shopee’s own help documentation states that the service runs through PT Lentera Dana Nusantara, a peer-to-peer lending platform licensed and supervised by the Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (OJK, the Financial Services Authority), with the money coming from funders registered on that platform and the risk of default resting with them.
Shopee’s Pinjaman Modal (Capital Loan, the working-capital facility arranged with a bank partner) is published at 0.99 percent per month on a flat basis, with a provision fee of 2 percent. On the worked example published by the bank itself, a facility of Rp24 million is repaid over twelve months at Rp. 2 million of principal a month. Interest is charged on the original Rp. 24 million throughout, which produces near Rp. 2.85 million across the year, while the balance the borrower actually has outstanding averages around Rp13 million. Paying Rp. 2.85 million to use an average of Rp. 13 million is an effective cost in the region of 22 percent a year, and nearer 25 percent once the Rp. 480,000 provision fee is added.
Compare that against the two alternatives on the same basis. Kredit Usaha Rakyat (KUR, People’s Business Credit) is set at 6 percent effective per year for a first-time borrower under Peraturan Menteri Koordinator Bidang Perekonomian Nomor 7 Tahun 2025 (Permenko 7/2025, the KUR implementation guidelines), on facilities up to Rp. 500 million, with the rate rising in stages for repeat borrowing. A commercial facility is priced from the bank’s published Suku Bunga Dasar Kredit (SBDK, prime lending rate), which every conventional bank must publish under Peraturan OJK Nomor 13 Tahun 2024 (POJK 13/2024). Bank Tabungan Negara’s published SBDK at 1 April 2026 was 8.75 percent for retail borrowers and 10.35 percent for small business, with the micro segment at 13.65 percent. The SBDK excludes the risk premium the bank sets for each borrower, so the rate actually charged is higher than the published base.
Platform credit at roughly 25 percent all in is therefore around four times the cost of a subsidised KUR facility, and materially above a commercial facility priced from a published base of 8.75 to 10.35 percent plus a premium. The product is licensed and supervised, and for a seller who needs stock ahead of a campaign it can be the right answer, because what the extra cost buys is speed. We set the arithmetic out in full in our article on the hidden price of idle cash and slow-paying customers, and our article on high interest lending scams in Indonesia examines the same discipline from the lender’s position.
Choosing on evidence
This is the sequence TraceWorthy works through with a client, in four steps.
- Begin with the buyer you actually want.
Where that buyer is Indonesian and price-led, the three platforms are where they already are, and the work is content, ranking, margin, and repeat purchase. Where that buyer is international and brand-led, your own store or an export channel is the only place the relationship can be owned. - Price the traffic before you price the platform.
A Shopify subscription costs tens of dollars a month, and the advertising required to bring buyers to it can cost many times that. A seller who proceeds without a costed traffic plan has a store with no buyers coming to it. - Read the money before you accept any of it.
Identify who is lending, convert every flat rate into what it actually costs, and compare the result against a KUR facility and against a commercial facility priced from the bank’s published prime lending rate, before accepting the fastest offer. - Decide the structure last, on the requirement rather than the aspiration.
State what you need in one sentence without using the word offshore. If that sentence describes something Indonesia excludes you from, you have a reason. If it describes a preference, you have a commercial judgement that must be argued on its merits and priced against the whole cost of maintaining a company abroad.
Each step requires evidence: what traffic costs in your category, what your own margin and rate of stock turnover will support, what a facility’s terms permit the lender to do with your data and your business, and whether a structure withstands scrutiny under Indonesian tax and disclosure law. Assembling that evidence is the work we do.
How we help
TraceWorthy’s legal, compliance and finance teams support clients to assess the channel before the company commits to it. The review can include:
- PT PMDN or PT PMA structure and Klasifikasi Baku Lapangan Usaha (KBLI, Indonesian Standard Industrial Classification) review.
- Online Single Submission (OSS) licensing, and a check of your Perdagangan Melalui Sistem Elektronik (PMSE, electronic commerce) activity.
- Product-compliance review for Indonesian and export sales.
- Marketplace, own-store, and Amazon channel comparison.
- Coretax, marketplace PPh 22, PPN, and income-tax mapping.
- Payment-gateway and settlement review.
- Penyelenggara Sistem Elektronik (PSE, electronic system operator) registration and a personal-data checklist.
- Platform-credit cost comparison.
- Working-capital model for stock, advertising, fees, freight, and returns.
- Governance documents, contracts, and internal procedures.
The result is a channel plan you can operate, finance, report, and defend.
The TraceWorthy team consists of highly experienced Indonesian lawyers, accountants, tax specialists, and compliance professionals whom Founder Tracy Wilkinson recruited and trained to a standard set against international practice rather than local convention. Tracy’s own contribution is the business model and strategy, drawn from a career across many sectors and several countries, leveraged into an Indonesian context.
If you are deciding whether to sell through Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Amazon, or your own website, speak with TraceWorthy. Our team is your team.
This article is general information current at the date of publication. Platform terms, interest rates, tax rules, and Indonesian regulation change, and the position for any business depends on its own facts, so obtain advice for your own situation before you act. It is not financial or investment advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do Indonesians actually buy online?
Overwhelmingly on three platforms. Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop counted with Tokopedia together took 98.8 percent of Southeast Asian platform GMV in 2025, with Shopee taking around 53 percent of the regional market and ranking first in all six major markets. Indonesia is the largest market in the region at around 37 percent of regional GMV. Content commerce, meaning live selling and short-form video, generated an estimated USD 49.7 billion across the region and accounted for 32 percent of regional platform GMV, against 20 percent a year earlier. That figure is regional rather than Indonesian, and it indicates where platform demand is moving.
Is the Indonesian e-commerce market still growing?
It is growing slowly by regional standards. Indonesian platform GMV grew 2.2 percent in 2025, following Bukalapak’s exit from physical goods and the rationalisation of Tokopedia, while Thailand grew 51.8 percent and Malaysia 47.6 percent. Indonesia remains by far the largest market in Southeast Asia, so the volume is here. Selling more inside it now means taking share from a competitor rather than relying on market growth to do the work.
Can an Indonesian business use Shopify?
Yes, and 4,181 live Shopify stores were counted in Indonesia at the fourth quarter of 2025. The limitation is payment rather than permission. Shopify Payments does not operate in Indonesia, and an Indonesian Stripe account does not connect to a Shopify store, so an Indonesia-based store uses a local gateway such as Xendit or Midtrans. That serves Indonesian buyers well and does not deliver the international card checkout an overseas customer expects, and Shopify charges a surcharge on every sale taken through a third-party gateway.
Can an Indonesian business borrow from Shopify Capital?
No. Eligibility is limited to businesses located in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with the principal place of business and the bank account both inside the supported country and repayment running through Shopify Payments. An Indonesian-domiciled seller is excluded on all three grounds, and a foreign-owned PT PMA is excluded on the same basis, since eligibility follows where the business is located rather than who owns it.
Can I sell on Amazon from Indonesia?
Yes, as an exporter. Amazon operates no Indonesian marketplace, so Amazon Global Selling from Indonesia means selling into amazon.com or another overseas marketplace. Amazon pays sellers into a local bank account through its currency converter, so no entity abroad is required to be paid. What is required is a seller account for the destination marketplace, an internationally chargeable card, compliance with the destination country’s product rules, export documentation, customs clearance, and, where Fulfilment by Amazon is used, stock shipped and warehoused abroad before it sells.
Should I sell on a marketplace or build my own store?
Both, in most cases. Marketplaces supply volume, discovery, delivery, and cash flow, and an own-brand store supplies margin, the customer list, and a business that can be sold. Non-platform channels, which include sellers’ own websites, took an estimated USD 27.8 billion across Southeast Asia in 2025, and platforms fell from 89 percent of total e-commerce to 85 percent, so the own-store channel is gaining share rather than shrinking. What decides the value of the business is which route to market you own, because the party that owns the route sets the terms across it.
Does a marketplace account remove the need for a licence?
No. Selling through a marketplace or through your own website is Perdagangan Melalui Sistem Elektronik under PP 80/2019, and Permendag 31/2023 requires business actors in it to have licensing that matches the activity. Licensing runs through the risk-based system under PP 28/2025, which replaced the previous framework on 5 June 2025 and added the operation of electronic systems and transactions as a regulated sector. The KBLI code on OSS must describe what you actually sell, and KBLI 4791 covers retail trade by mail order or internet. The platform verifies you as a merchant. It does not licence your business.
What changed for marketplace tax in 2026?
The Directorate General of Taxes appointed Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Blibli as PPh 22 collectors on 1 July 2026 under PMK 37/2025, and collection begins on 1 August 2026. Those platforms withhold 0.5 percent of gross turnover, excluding PPN, when the buyer’s payment reaches the platform. It is creditable, so it is a change to timing rather than to the amount of tax owed. The Rp500 million exemption is for individual taxpayers who file a declaration, so a PT is collected from on the first rupiah. TikTok Shop is not among the four appointed platforms, and the list is expected to grow.