Echelon Commerce — Stop Building Shopee's Business. Build Yours.

Every time Shopee raises fees, you absorb it. Every time they change the algorithm, your sales fluctuate. Every time they run a mega-sale, your margins evaporate.

You don't own your customers on Shopee. You don't even get their email addresses. You are renting an audience on someone else's platform, and the rent keeps going up.

2% take rate in 2019. 12% in 2025. Where does it stop?

2019

2021

2023

2025

12%

2027

Think about what you've handed over. Your customer list belongs to Shopee. Your repeat purchase data belongs to Shopee. Your pricing power erodes every time a competitor undercuts you by RM 2 and the algorithm rewards them for it. You built the brand. They keep the relationship.

And the worst part: when Shopee decides to push their own competing products or favorites a cheaper alternative, you have no recourse. Your visibility drops overnight. Your sales follow. You have no email list to fall back on, no direct channel to reach the customers you spent years acquiring.

The Brands That Are Pulling Ahead

The smartest DTC brands in Malaysia and Singapore aren't quitting Shopee. They're making it optional. They're building Shopify stores that actually convert -- not brochure sites that exist as an afterthought next to their Shopee listing.

These brands own their customer data. They run email sequences that bring buyers back without paying for another ad click. They control their pricing, their margins, and their brand experience from end to end. When Shopee raises fees again -- and they will -- these brands shrug. Because Shopee is 30% of their revenue, not 80%.

The revenue split is the number that matters. Brands with 70%+ marketplace dependency are one policy change away from crisis. Brands with a healthy DTC channel have leverage, margin, and optionality.

Every ringgit you earn on brand.com is a ringgit Shopee doesn't take 12% of.

What We Do

DTC Channel Audit

We go through your Shopify store by hand against the things that decide whether it can carry your revenue -- mobile, checkout, email capture, trust -- and rank what is costing you the most.

Revenue Split Analysis

You think your marketplace dependency is "normal." We'll work out what your split is actually costing you, at the commission and fee rates you pay today, and what you'd keep by moving 20%, 40% or 60% of it to brand.com. Your numbers, not someone else's.

Migration Roadmap

Not a strategy deck. Not a 90-day transformation pitch. A ranked list of changes ordered by how much margin they recover, starting with the ones you can ship this week. You keep selling on Shopee. You just stop depending on it.

HERE IS WHAT I CAN ACTUALLY PROVE.

What I Can Prove

I do not have a case study where I moved a brand's revenue split off Shopee, and I am not going to invent one. What I have is the work that decides whether the shift is even possible: making the Shopify store good enough to hold the traffic.

A Singapore travel-accessories store with over 12,000 SKUs. A six-week rebuild, no extra ad spend.

Conversion went from 1.2% to 1.9%.

Nothing about the traffic changed. The store just stopped losing people. On a marketplace, that lift belongs to the marketplace. On brand.com, it is yours.

A beauty and supplements brand converting at 0.49%. No visible reviews, a confusing mobile layout, an extra checkout step, no social proof.

0.49% to 2.65% in three months.

Over five times the revenue per visitor, on the same traffic. This is the part most brands skip before they try to move off Shopee -- and it is why the move fails when they do.

MEET THE PERSON BEHIND ECHELON COMMERCE

Faisal Hourani, Founder

9 years helping MY/SG brands build DTC channels

I founded Echelon Commerce because I kept watching great Malaysian brands pour everything into Shopee and own nothing. No customer emails, no repeat purchase data, no control over margins. I help brands build their Shopify store into a real revenue channel — not a brochure that sits next to their Shopee listing. I'm not saying quit Shopee. I'm saying make it optional.

The work is specific: audit your DTC readiness, put a ringgit figure on what your marketplace split costs you, and build a roadmap to get off it. No vague strategy decks. No 90-day transformation promises. Just a clear-eyed look at where you are and what to do next.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia · [email protected]

WHERE DOES YOUR BRAND SIT ON THE INDEPENDENCE SPECTRUM?

The DTC Independence Scorecard

Score your brand across 10 dimensions that determine whether you could survive without Shopee. Takes 5 minutes. You score it yourself, and you keep the result.

Got it. Faisal will send your DTC Independence Scorecard within 24 hours.

OR, IF YOU ALREADY KNOW IT'S TIME TO BUILD THE ALTERNATIVE:

Stop Building Shopee's Business. Build Yours.