What it costs to sell online in the Philippines

Four channels, three different shapes of cost. The one that catches sellers out is not the headline rate, it is that a marketplace charges per order forever while a platform charges per month.

A marketplace: Shopee and Lazada

You are not charged one fee, you are charged several, and they stack on every order. A commission on the item, a service fee on top of it, and a transaction fee on the payment. Sellers comparing notes in the Philippines routinely add these up into the low twenties as a percentage of an order, and both platforms publish their own current schedules, which change.What you get for it is real and worth saying plainly: their traffic. Someone browsing Shopee finds you without ever having heard of you. That is the thing a website of your own does not do, and any comparison that leaves it out is selling you something.The cost that does not appear on the invoice is the customer. The order, the phone number and the buying history belong to the marketplace, so the second sale has to be bought again.

A platform: Shopify

A monthly plan billed in dollars, and no commission on your sales. The part that surprises Philippine merchants is the second line: Shopify Payments is not available here, so a local gateway goes underneath it and takes its own cut of every transaction. Then the apps that make it work locally are each their own subscription.

Your own site: what Menue costs

A monthly plan from ₱1,200, and Menue takes no share of any order. Customers pay by GCash, Maya or card into your own merchant account, so money settles straight to your bank and the payment provider's own rate is the only per-order cost.And the honest limit: your own site does not come with anybody's traffic. It is the channel you send your own customers to, from your ads, your Instagram and the receipt in their hand, which is why most merchants run it alongside a marketplace rather than instead of one.

Six reasons merchants here run their own site as well

Everything below works on the day you sign up, apart from the POS, which has not launched yet.

Built to show up on Google and in AI search

Your online ordering pages publish their menu, prices, address and branches as structured data, so Google and AI assistants can read them. As observed on 28 August 2026, Menue merchants have come up first for their own name, and ChatGPT has answered with their store as the ordering link.

See the real search results →

Delivery and shipping, booked from the order

A same-city order books a rider. A parcel to another province gets its box worked out, its fee charged at checkout and its waybill created. Local couriers are wired in, not bolted on with an app.

How delivery works →Nationwide shipping →

E-wallet and card payments, 0% commission

Customers pay by GCash, Maya or card through your own merchant account, so money settles straight to your bank. Menue takes no share of any order. Plans start at ₱1,200 a month.

See the plans →

Already built, no technical skills needed

No theme to pick, no app store to assemble, nobody to hire. Add your products and prices and the store works. Most merchants are taking orders the same week.

Watch the setup →

Meta Pixel and Conversions API included

Facebook and Instagram are where your customers already are. Add to basket, checkout and purchase are reported back to Meta, so your ads optimise on real sales rather than guesses.

How the Meta setup works →

A BIR-accredited POS, at launch

The counter and the website will stop being two businesses. It will be one menu, one stock count, one set of sales, whether the order came from a phone across town or the person in front of you. It will be BIR-accredited from launch, so the receipts are the official ones.

What the POS will do →

The difference is who does the work

None of this is impossible on Shopify. A payment app for the e-wallets, a courier app for delivery, another for nationwide shipping, and the Meta sales channel for the events.That is five or six moving parts, each with its own account and its own way of breaking, and someone has to own them. Most merchants here do not have that person, and the ones who do would rather they were working on the business.Menue ships the finished thing. One system, one login, one place where an order, a payment and a rider are the same record, with the counter joining them at launch.Worth knowing before you switch: the POS has not launched yet, and today one delivery partner and one shipping partner are live with more in development. What you get on day one is the whole spine of the business in one system: the search engine that brings customers to you, the fulfilment that gets the order out of the door, and every payment tracked against the order it belongs to.

Growing past one market

Menue reaches Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam in Q1 2027, built the same way: the payment methods and couriers those customers actually use, not an international platform asked to pretend.