The honest answer is both, deliberately, not one instead of the other. Marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada bring you built-in traffic and buyer trust at the cost of real fees, commonly totaling somewhere around 10 to 13 percent of each sale once commission, transaction charges, and shipping subsidies are combined, plus zero ownership of the customer relationship. Your own Facebook or Instagram page brings you the full margin and a direct relationship, at the cost of having to generate your own traffic entirely. Most small businesses need both, used for different jobs.
I have watched businesses over-commit to one side of this decision and pay for it in different ways. The marketplace-only sellers wake up one day and realize they have no way to reach their own customers directly. The own-page-only sellers spend heavily on traffic that a marketplace would have brought them for a fee. It's a recurring theme in our work with online and e-commerce sellers.
What a marketplace actually gives you
Built-in discovery. Shopee alone carries dramatically higher monthly traffic in the Philippines than most alternatives, and a share of that traffic is actively searching for products like yours without you spending a peso to bring them there.
Buyer trust already established. A customer who has bought safely on Shopee before extends some of that trust to any seller on the platform, which is a real head start a brand-new page does not have.
Built-in payment and logistics infrastructure. You are not solving payment collection or shipping from scratch.
What that convenience actually costs
This is the part sellers consistently underestimate. Marketplace fees are not a single simple percentage. They stack: category commission, a transaction fee, shipping subsidy contributions, and sometimes additional program fees for things like discount vouchers or live selling features. The practical lesson, regardless of the exact current numbers: price your products accounting for the full fee stack, not just the headline commission rate. A product that looks profitable against a single quoted percentage can quietly lose money once every fee is accounted for.
What you don't get from a marketplace, no matter how well you sell
The customer's contact information generally stays with the platform, not with you. You cannot message a Shopee buyer directly to tell them about a new product, ask them to follow your Facebook page, or build the kind of ongoing relationship covered in our retention article. Every sale is, in a real sense, rented, not owned. This matters more than it seems in the moment of a sale, because it means your entire customer relationship depends on continuing to win the marketplace's internal competition for visibility, rather than on a relationship that is genuinely yours.
What your own page gives you that a marketplace never will
The full margin, minus payment processing, which is dramatically lower than marketplace fee stacks.
A direct line to the customer, through Messenger, your page, and any list you build, which is the foundation of every retention and follow-up strategy covered elsewhere in this cluster.
Complete control over presentation, pricing, and promotions, without competing directly against similar listings on the same page.
What it costs you that a marketplace absorbs
Every visitor has to be earned, through content, ads, or word of mouth, since there is no built-in discovery mechanism handing you buyers who were already searching. This is real, ongoing work, and it is the reason a brand-new page with no following often struggles initially against a marketplace listing that gets discovered passively.
A practical way to split your effort
Use marketplaces for discovery and new customer acquisition, particularly for products in categories where marketplace search behavior is strong. Accept the fee as the cost of that discovery.
Use your own page for relationship and repeat business. Include something in your marketplace packaging or follow-up, where platform rules allow, that invites the customer to follow your own page, so a first marketplace sale can become a repeat sale you did not have to pay marketplace fees on.
Track which channel actually produces your best customers, not just your most transactions. A marketplace can generate high volume at low margin. Your own page, once it has traffic, generates lower volume at a much healthier margin, and often a higher-value, more loyal customer.
When to lean more heavily one direction
Lean into marketplaces if you are brand new with zero following, sell in a category where marketplace search volume is genuinely strong, or need cash flow now more than long-term relationship building.
Lean into your own page once you have an existing following or community, sell something higher-margin or harder to commoditize against marketplace competitors, or have started building the follow-up and retention systems that make a direct relationship actually pay off.
The mistake I see most often
Choosing based on which platform feels easier to set up rather than which one matches the actual economics of the specific product. A high-margin, relationship-driven service business often does not belong heavily on a marketplace at all. A low-margin, commodity physical product often cannot survive on Facebook ad spend alone without the discovery a marketplace provides.
What this decision is not
It is not permanent, and it is not all-or-nothing. Many successful sellers here run both simultaneously, using each for what it is actually good at, and adjusting the balance as their own following and margins change over time.