Adding Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop or Amazon to your own Singapore store, when not one of them serves a fee you can read

Add a marketplace when you can state the margin you will accept before you list, and not before, because on 28 October 2026 we opened six Singapore marketplace seller routes and not one of them served a commission or transaction fee figure we could read. The own store platform published everything: plan prices in Singapore dollars, card rates to two decimal places and third party transaction fees by tier. So the asymmetry a Singapore seller is working with is not about reach. It is that the cost of your own channel is published and the cost of every marketplace channel has to be extracted from a seller account or an account manager. That changes the order of the decision. Work out your own floor from the numbers you can read, then make each marketplace prove its take in writing before you give it inventory.

What we actually opened, and what came back

Six routes, read on 28 October 2026, with the status and the served body recorded rather than guessed. A body that loads is not the same as an answer, and four of these loaded.

Route	What was served on 28 October 2026
seller.shopee.sg	An empty body. No text, no fee figure, no schedule
seller.shopee.sg, Seller Education Hub article	The heading "Seller Education Hub" and nothing else. No commission, transaction or service fee figure, and no effective date
lazada.sg seller fees help page	A 302 redirect to helpcenter.lazada.sg, which served the title "Help Center" with no body text, no tables and no figures
seller-sg.tiktok.com	A promotional banner, "Boost your sales on TikTok Shop Singapore", with an invitation to sign up at no cost. No percentage and no fee detail
carousell.sg	HTTP 403. Nothing was served, so nothing can be concluded about what it publishes
sell.amazon.sg/pricing	A 301 redirect to sell.amazon.com.sg/pricing, which returned HTTP 404. Amazon's global selling page names Singapore twice and carries no Singapore fee figure. Its fee sections cover the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Europe, Japan, India, Australia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and not Singapore

One more was attempted and must be reported as unread rather than as empty. The request to qoo10.sg failed at DNS resolution from this machine, so no body was received and this page makes no claim at all about what that site publishes.

The point of recording it this way is that three of these routes returned a valid page with styling and navigation and no answer. A fetch that returns a document is easy to mistake for a fetch that returned a fee schedule, and a seller who reads a shell and concludes the fee must be low has been told nothing.

The one set of Singapore numbers that is published in full

Your own store's platform publishes the lot, in the right currency, which makes it the only reliable denominator in this decision. Read on shopify.com on 28 October 2026, every figure labelled as printed.

Plan	Paying yearly	Paying monthly	Online card rate	Third party transaction fee
Basic	"$29 SGD/mo"	"$39 SGD/mo"	"3.2% + $0.50 SGD"	"2%"
Grow	"$99 SGD/mo"	"$132 SGD/mo"	"3.1% + $0.50 SGD"	"1%"
Advanced	"$399 SGD/mo"	"$531 SGD/mo"	"3% + $0.50 SGD"	"0.6%"
Plus	Not shown separately	"from $2,300 USD/mo"	"2.9% + $0.50 SGD"	"0.2%"

Note what the last column is. It is the penalty for processing a payment through anything other than the platform's own gateway, and it falls from 2 per cent to 0.2 per cent as you move up the plans. For a Singapore seller taking payment through a local provider rather than the built in one, that column can matter more than the monthly plan price, and it is the sort of line that is published here and simply unavailable for a marketplace.

There is also a free channel beside all of this that is frequently forgotten. Read on support.google.com on 28 October 2026, Google states that products "can appear at no cost on Google" and that "Your free listings can appear on the Shopping tab", available "in all countries where free listings are live on the Shopping tab". A product feed into Merchant Center is not a marketplace and takes no commission, which makes it the cheapest additional surface a Singapore store can add.

How to decide without a published commission, in three numbers you already have

You do not need the marketplace's rate card to make this decision. You need your own floor, and then the marketplace has to clear it.

• Your contribution margin per unit, after everything your own channel costs. Selling price, less cost of goods, less the card rate on your own store, less packing and delivery, less any third party transaction fee from the table above. That figure is knowable to the cent today.
• The percentage of that margin you are willing to hand over for demand you did not have to buy. Decide this before anybody quotes you, and write it down. A seller who sets the number afterwards always accepts the number offered. It is also worth knowing what the alternative costs, because some of that demand is reachable without a commission at all, and the cheapest routes to it are in our page on how a Singapore business raises enquiries without raising ad spend.
• The order volume at which the fixed costs of a second channel are covered. Listing creation, photography to the platform's spec, a second stock count and somebody answering platform messages inside the platform's response window. These are real and they are mostly labour.

With those three, the conversation with any marketplace becomes short. You ask for the commission rate, the transaction fee, the payment settlement period and the cost of any programme you are being enrolled into, in writing, against your own category. If a platform will not put those four in writing before you list, you have learned something useful without spending anything.

The Singapore layer, which changes the net rather than the gross

• GST applies to your sales and to the platform's fees. IRAS publishes that "The current GST rate is 9%" and that a business "must register for GST when your taxable turnover exceeds $1 million", read on iras.gov.sg on 28 October 2026. A marketplace that pushes you across that threshold has changed your pricing, your invoicing and your reporting, and that cost belongs in the decision rather than in next year's surprise.
• Settlement timing is working capital. Your own store settles on the card processor's cycle. A marketplace settles on its own, and the gap between dispatching stock and receiving cash is a financing cost that no commission table shows.
• The customer record stays where the order was taken. On your own store you hold the email, the consent and the repeat purchase history. On a marketplace you usually hold none of the three, which makes every sale a first sale.

Which platform suits which kind of product, and what each one does to a considered purchase, is a different question and we answer it separately in our page on Shopee, Lazada and Carousell against Google for a Singapore business. This page is about whether you can cost the decision, and the finding above is that from the platforms' own pages you cannot.

What the assistants reached for when a Singapore seller asked this

The instrument is saved assistant answers rather than a keyword tool, and no search volume exists for this question. The set holds 64 blind pipelines across 32 batches put to ChatGPT and Gemini on 26 October 2026, with Singapore written into the text of every question because the search interface we query accepts country, language and location parameters, returns HTTP 200 for each and acts on none of them.

"Which marketplaces should I be on as well as my own store?" produced two readings, one per engine, and neither named a supplier or a tool. What the engines cited is the interesting part. Across 20 hosts the set included straitstimes.com, airwallex.com, globaldata.com, an insurer's content hub, a Singapore courier, Google's own documentation and two Singapore agency sites. Exactly one marketplace owned host appeared in the whole citation set, seller-sg.tiktok.com, and that is the page we read which served a banner and no figure. So when a Singapore seller asks an assistant this question, the answer is being built out of newspapers, payment companies and agency blogs, because the fee schedules the seller actually needs are not in the readable web either. That is the same finding from the other direction.

Questions about adding a marketplace to a Singapore store

Does this mean the marketplaces hide their fees?

No, and the distinction matters. Seller fee schedules in this market generally sit behind a seller account rather than on the open web, which is a different thing from being concealed. What it means practically is that the figure has to be obtained from inside the account or from a person, and that a comparison made from third party blog posts is a comparison of other people's assumptions.

Can I use a third party fee calculator instead?

Use one to sketch and never to decide. Third party guides for this market disagree with each other on commission ranges, transaction percentages and waiver periods, and none of them is the platform. The figure that governs your invoice is the one in your own seller account on the day you list.

Should a new Singapore product business start on a marketplace or on its own store?

Start wherever you can read the cost, which today means your own store, then add a marketplace once your contribution margin is known and your fixed costs are covered. Starting on a channel whose take you cannot calculate means you will not know for months whether the business works.

Is Google Shopping a marketplace?

No, and that is its advantage here. Google publishes that products "can appear at no cost on Google" through free listings, read 28 October 2026, and the order is still taken on your own site, so you keep the customer record and pay no commission. It is an additional surface rather than an additional channel.

How many marketplaces can a small Singapore team actually run?

One, properly, before a second. Each platform adds a message queue with its own response expectation, its own listing specification and its own stock count, and the failure mode is not lost sales but oversold inventory. Add the second when the first is boring.

What should I get in writing before I list anything?

The commission rate for your specific category, the transaction fee, the settlement period and the cost of every programme you are being signed up to. Four answers, one email, and the reply is the only document in this decision that will still be accurate next month.

We are not on this page, and the reason is the subject

What we sell is a measurement of what AI assistants say about a business, and no reading of an assistant will tell a Singapore seller what Shopee takes on a S$40 order. The honest answer to this question is arithmetic you own plus four figures you have to ask for, and putting a measurement product into that list would be padding it. So this page names us nowhere. The thing worth carrying out of the reading above is smaller and free: of the twenty hosts two assistants cited when a Singapore seller asked which marketplaces to join, only one belonged to a marketplace, and it served a banner. If you sell something, the pages that describe it on a domain you control are the only part of this whole decision that is both readable by a buyer and readable by a machine, which is an argument for your own store that has nothing to do with commission at all.