High Sales But Low Profit Due to 30% GP? Time to Build Your Own Web Commerce Store
Making 2 million in sales but losing nearly a million to platform fees! . Leaving your business's survival and profits 100% on someone else's property is a risk that modern marketers and brand owners need to re-evaluate immediately.
Especially in an era where e-Marketplaces and Social Commerce platforms continue to continuously increase their fee rates. If we map out the timeline just for the first half of 2026, it becomes clearly evident that the cost of selling on platforms has significantly spiked:
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Shopee: Adjusted its fee structure two times in a row, starting from April by raising transaction and installment fees, and recently announcing a new selling fee hike effective June 1, 2026, pushing the total expenses to reach 15-17% in certain product categories.
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TikTok Shop: Just adjusted its fee structure on May 6, 2026, increasing both commission fees (up to 9.63%) and charging additional growth support fees, leading to news headlines where some merchants faced total deductions exceeding 25% of their sales revenue.
And what's even more painful... these skyrocketing fee figures are just the "base cost" that doesn't yet include the "advertising costs" (Ads) that brands must pay additionally to the platforms to fight for visibility.
Because in a market crowded with competitors, if you don't run ads to boost your products, your store will just disappear from the news feed or search pages. It turns out that out of 100 Baht in sales, you get hit by GP, hit by in-app ads, and still have to cut your own flesh to offer discount codes just to compete with other shops.
Ultimately, the net profit that actually reaches the brand might barely be enough to get by.
These situations reflect one ultimate truth: We cannot avoid it when we borrow someone else's nose to breathe. When the landlord raises the rent or changes the algorithm, the brand just has to bow down and shoulder the costs. This is the strategic reason why building a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) channel or your own Web commerce is not just a passing trend, but the "way to survive" to reclaim control over your profits and build long-term business sustainability.
Web commerce: How to start without getting hurt?
Many people instantly think of impossibilities and months of consumption when they hear the words "building a website." But actually, in today's world, having your own website is not out of reach or reserved only for big brands. With diverse technology and tool providers available, any brand can have its own website.
However, the heart of the matter lies in how to start without getting hurt and grow effectively:
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Choose a SaaS Platform that fits your business: Use ready-made platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or other systems. Just pay a monthly service fee, and you get a store structure ready to sell, capable of accepting credit cards instantly, saving massive setup time. Furthermore, these platforms also offer backend plug-ins that connect to various systems, not to mention market expansion abroad, where tools like Shopify have features ready for immediate scale.
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Lay the Data Infrastructure from day one: This is where many brands stumble—"beautiful website but terrible data." Every Baht you spend on deciding to build a Web commerce store must gain an asset of higher value than just beauty; it must gain "First-Party Data" that has a good structure and is ready for future use. It should pave the way to connect with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or CRM to analyze further who your best customers are and what their buying behaviors look like. Remember that "data is the most valuable thing to invest in."
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Build an SEO Foundation (Search Engine Optimization): Just having a beautiful website is not enough; you must make people find you on Google too. The website structure must support SEO from day one, naming products, writing descriptions, and setting URLs based on keywords that customers actually use to search, to pave the way for free traffic in the future.
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Achieve Seamless Integration: The backend system must operate smoothly, completely connecting with logistics and inventory systems so that the team can focus on marketing strategies rather than manually packing products or taking orders.
Invested already, when is the break-even point?
On average, the break-even point for a Web commerce store usually falls within 6-12 months, depending on the brand's own strategy as well.
The reason it doesn't break even on day one is because we cannot avoid paying fixed costs for system development and must pump advertising budgets to pull people (traffic) into our own home.
The crucial equation to keep under control is that CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) must be lower than LTV (Customer Lifetime Value).
To explain simply: During the initial stage, you might accept paying higher ad costs or doing exclusive on-site promotions to draw customers in. But we must have a backend system strong enough to retain this customer with the brand, making them return to repurchase until it outweighs the initial cost spent on acquiring them.
How to break even the fastest?
The key strategy is "reducing the proportion of acquiring new people and turning to nurture old customers instead."
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Nurture SEO to reduce CAC costs: Running ads to pull traffic all the time is like burning money in the long run. If the SEO foundation starts working, it will continuously attract new customers organically (Organic Traffic) without spending a single Baht on ads. The average cost of acquiring one customer will drop, leading to a faster break-even point.
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The Long-Game Strategy: Although the initial development cost is high, in the long run, bringing existing customers back to repurchase is still 5-7 times cheaper than finding new ones! Bringing data to manage Loyalty Programs or launching hyper-personalized campaigns that match each customer group's desires will leapfrog repeat purchase rates exponentially.
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Utilize AI and Marketing Automation: Elevate operations with goal-oriented automated systems. For example, if the system detects that a customer abandoned their shopping cart, the AI will send an email or a notification back to them with a special offer to close the sale without needing human effort.
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Create an Exclusive Experience: You must create reasons why people are willing to change their habits to buy on the website, such as arranging special-priced product sets or items available exclusively on the website (Web-Exclusive) to act as a magnet pulling people into our home.
Up to this point, it doesn't mean you have to shut down your stores on marketplaces and migrate 100% to your own website.
The most high-performing strategy in this era is integrating channels in an Omnichannel manner. Brands should use e-Marketplaces as excellent tools for acquisition (finding new customers) because it is a space where people crowdedly walk around, ready to spend money. But once customers finish their first order, there must be a retention strategy to pull them to repurchase on our Web commerce channel for their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th orders.
That way, the brand can collect full profits without having to split a 30% GP with anyone else anymore. The most important thing is "you must start thinking and taking action today." Building SEO, structuring data, and creating Brand Loyalty are not things that can be conjured overnight. They are all long-term games that require time to accumulate trust. The sooner you drive the stakes to build your own home, the faster your business will gain freedom and grow limitlessly.
#WebCommerce #DirectToConsumer #SaaSPlatform #FirstPartyData #SEO #MarketingAutomation #Omnichannel #PRIMO
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