06 Aug Should Your Meta Ads Send People to Shopee/Lazada or Your Own Website?
If you sell on Shopee or Lazada in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, or Taiwan, you’ve probably felt it: fees are climbing, and for some sellers they’re now eating over 20% of every sale. If you’re trading rather than manufacturing, that’s not a margin problem — that’s a survival problem.
The instinct is to build your own e-commerce website and route people there instead. But that instinct alone doesn’t work. I’ve helped a handful of brands try to move away from Shopee over the past few years, and I’ll be upfront: the success rate isn’t great. It’s still possible, but it depends entirely on what you’re selling and how you approach it.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Shopee has built an ecosystem people don’t want to leave — buy-now-pay-later, one-click familiarity, no need to register on a new site. When you’re on both Shopee and your own website, people will almost always choose Shopee first because it’s easier. Asking them to sign up somewhere new feels like a hustle, and most shoppers won’t bother.
That’s the honest starting point. Here’s the thing most people get wrong: they treat “build a website” as the strategy, when really there are three different strategies depending on your situation, and picking the wrong one wastes a year of ad spend.
Strategy 1: Go all-in on your own website
This is the fastest, most powerful route — and it’s not for everyone.
It only works if you have an established brand. If your product is easily replaceable — there are a thousand near-identical listings on Shopee — cutting off your marketplace presence removes you from where your customers are already browsing. You won’t be in front of them, and you won’t sell.
But if you’ve built brand recognition over the years, Shopee and Lazada become just a place people can buy from, not a place where you build new customers. Your customer base is supposed to be yours. And on Shopee, you don’t get customer emails or usable contact data, which makes it hard to build any long-term relationship at all.
If this is the route you’re considering, you need an actual e-commerce system in place before you switch, not just a website:
- A functioning website — the baseline
- A loyalty mechanism — a reason for people to keep buying from you directly instead of drifting back to the marketplace
- A nurturing system — email at minimum, but a real plan: how often you email, what you send, and how new customers get looped into that sequence. If you’re using WhatsApp too, that needs its own plan before launch, not after.
Strategy 2: Use Shopee as the front door, your website as the back end
This is the more common path for brands without an established name yet, and it’s the one I’d point most sellers toward first.
Here’s how it works: you run ads — including Meta ads — to drive people to Shopee. Shopee absorbs the cost of acquiring a first-time buyer. Once they’ve purchased once, you build a system to bring them back to your own website for repeat purchases.
This only works for products people buy repeatedly. One of my clients sells adult diapers — not glamorous, but a great example. Front-end customer acquisition is expensive, but once someone likes the product, they rarely switch brands as long as the price stays reasonable. That’s exactly the kind of repeat-purchase behavior this strategy needs.
On the website side, you can afford to sell slightly cheaper, because you’re not paying Shopee’s 20%+ cut. Combine that with a loyalty system and the customer data you can now actually collect, and you can nurture people through email and WhatsApp — turning one-time buyers into repeat customers, and repeat customers into advocates.
This isn’t instant. That client started at 1-2% of total e-commerce revenue coming from their own website. It took about a year of consistent execution to get to close to 10%. Slow, but real.
Strategy 3: Make your website the ad destination, not Shopee
This is the one a lot of my clients don’t have a deliberate plan for yet, but it’s worth building toward — especially if you’re trying to establish yourself as a brand, not just a listing.
Instead of running Meta ads straight to Shopee, you run them to your own website. On the website, you tell people you’re also on Shopee and Lazada, and that it’s cheaper to buy direct — but the choice is theirs. You’re not trying to force a channel; you make money either way.
Here’s why this matters more than it sounds: if you send Meta ad traffic directly into Shopee, people land in a sea of similar listings. If your product has any competition on the platform — and most do — shoppers browse, forget who brought them there, and often don’t buy from you at all.
When we tested this with a phone-casing brand, sending traffic to Shopee directly performed noticeably worse than sending it to the website first. On the website, people got introduced to the brand before entering “the sea of choices.” Even though the product itself was replaceable, the website visit gave us a chance to make the case — differentiation, USPs — before they clicked through to Shopee.
One catch: your website actually has to look credible. A rushed, unpolished site undermines the whole point.
This approach also changes how you measure success. You can’t just look at Shopee sales in isolation — you need to track total revenue against total ad spend across both channels, monthly or even weekly, to see the real return.
A quick way to check which strategy fits you
- Do you have a recognized brand, or is your product a commodity with lots of near-identical sellers? Established brand → Strategy 1 is viable. Commodity product → you likely still need a marketplace presence.
- Is your product something people buy once, or repeatedly? Repeat-purchase products are the best fit for Strategy 2’s hybrid model.
- Do you have a loyalty and nurturing system ready — or even planned? If not, don’t shift ad spend yet. You’ll just be paying more to run the same one-off transaction.
- Is your website actually presentable? If it looks thrown together, sending Meta ads traffic there first (Strategy 3) will underperform, not outperform, sending traffic straight to the marketplace.
None of these strategies are fast. The brand that went from 1-2% to close to 10% website revenue took about a year of consistent execution — not a campaign change, a structural one.
This breakdown is written by Jason Gan, a Meta Certified Professional and Badged Meta Business Partner who has personally audited over 1,000 advertiser accounts since 2010. You can see real account breakdowns on the Jason Gan YouTube channel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I stop selling on Shopee and Lazada completely? Only if you have a recognizable brand people already trust. If you’re selling a commodity product with hundreds of near-identical listings on Shopee or Lazada, cutting them off removes you from where your customers are already shopping, and you likely won’t survive on your own website alone. Going all-in on your own site works best for established brands, not undifferentiated trading products.
How long does it take to build meaningful website revenue away from Shopee? Expect roughly a year to shift materially. One brand went from 1-2% of e-commerce revenue on their own website to close to 10% over about a year, using a hybrid model where Shopee acquired new customers and the website handled repeat purchases. It’s a gradual shift, not a switch you flip overnight.
Does running Meta ads straight to Shopee hurt my brand? It can, especially if you’re not the only seller of that product. When Meta ads drive people directly into Shopee or Lazada, shoppers land in a sea of similar listings and often forget which brand brought them there in the first place. Sending traffic to your own website first, then letting people choose where to buy, tends to build more brand recognition.
What do I need in place before shifting ad spend to my own website? At minimum: a website that doesn’t look thrown together, a loyalty mechanism that gives people a reason to stick around, and a nurturing system (email, WhatsApp, or both) to follow up after the first purchase. Without these, you’re just moving the same one-off transaction to a more expensive place to run.
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