Your own online store or a marketplace: which pays off in 2026

Anyone selling products online hits this question early: do I stay on Mercado Livre and Shopee or build my own online store? The marketplace brings customers on day one. Your own store starts empty. It looks like an easy choice, until the commission bill arrives.

In 2026 that math changed. Shopee reworked its fees in March and made higher-priced products more expensive to sell. I pulled together the latest public data on commissions, where Brazilians shop, and the size of the market to answer with numbers, not opinions.

Where Brazilians shop online today

Marketplaces dominate. According to Visa's Panorama E-commerce study, cited by Central do Varejo, 71% of the country's online transactions happen on marketplaces. Stores' own sites get 20%, and direct links from social media, 8%.

The whole market keeps growing. ABIACOM, the industry association, estimates that Brazilian e-commerce brought in R$235.5 billion in 2025, up 15.3%, and projects R$259.8 billion for 2026, according to Times Brasil.

Two takeaways. First, ignoring marketplaces means giving up where most purchases happen. Second, 20% of transactions on own sites, in a market of almost R$260 billion, is too big a slice to hand entirely to someone who takes a commission on every sale.

How much the marketplace takes per sale

The most talked-about change of the year came from Shopee. In a February 2026 article on E-Commerce Brasil, consultant Raul Prado laid out what took effect in March:

• The fixed per-item fee went up. It used to be R$4 across all price ranges. From R$80 up, it became R$16, R$20, or R$26, depending on the price. The R$26 fee applies to everything above R$200.
• The R$100 per-item cap is gone. Before, with a 20% commission, a R$500 product and a R$5,000 product paid the same R$104. Now the R$5,000 one pays R$1,026.
• The Pix discount helps, but doesn't cover it all. On the R$5,000 product, the 8% Pix subsidy (R$400) covers only part of the R$922 increase.

In March, the same author published a pricing study with four real products, using a 20% commission on Shopee and 18% on Mercado Livre. On a R$200 blender, the platform keeps 33% of the sale on Shopee and 32% on Mercado Livre. On a R$4,000 TV, it keeps 21% on both.

Read that again: a third of the price of a R$200 product. That's before product cost, taxes, and packaging. For many businesses, the margin left over doesn't cover operations.

What your own online store costs

Your own store doesn't charge a commission per sale, but it has other costs, and it's worth looking at them without romanticizing:

1. The project. Design, catalog, checkout, and integration with payments, shipping, and invoicing. It's an upfront investment, and the price depends on catalog size and integrations. We show what drives that cost in how much a professional website costs.
2. Payment processing fees. Every store pays the card or Pix processor. It's much lower than a marketplace commission, but it exists.
3. Hosting, domain, and maintenance. A predictable monthly cost that doesn't grow with each order.
4. Bringing in customers. This is the heaviest cost. On a marketplace, the platform brings the traffic. On your own store, you do: Google, AI tools, social media, ads, customer list.

Item 4 decides the game. Your own store without traffic is a shop with the doors closed. So the right question isn't “which is cheaper,” but “who brings the customer, and what does that cost on each channel.”

When your own store wins

Based on the numbers above, your own online store starts to pay off when at least one of these is true:

• Your customers buy again. A repeat purchase on the marketplace pays commission again, on a customer who was already yours. On your own store, the repeat purchase comes through email, WhatsApp, or brand search, with no toll.
• Your ticket is high. With Shopee's cap gone, sellers above R$500 felt the difference more than anyone. The higher the price, the more stays with the platform.
• Your brand already gets searched. If people type your company's name into Google, sending that search to the marketplace means paying to sell to people who were already looking for you.
• You sell something that needs explaining. Technical, customized, or service-bundled products don't fit well on a standard marketplace page. On your own store, the page is designed around your customer's questions.

One of our examples of that last case is Certgon, a digital certificate store. Buyers rarely know which type to choose. We designed an e-commerce site that asks what the certificate is for and recommends the type, with a short checkout and PIX front and center. That kind of page doesn't exist in a marketplace listing.

When the marketplace wins

The marketplace is the right choice in other situations, and it would be dishonest to hide that:

• You're validating a product. To find out whether something sells, the marketplace gives you an answer in days, without investing in a store.
• Your product is a commodity. If customers only compare price and delivery time, they'll search the marketplace anyway.
• You can't drive traffic right now. With no budget for ads, content, or SEO, your own store just sits there.
• Your ticket is low and turnover is high. On cheap products, the platform handles shipping and trust in a way that's hard to match at first.

Both together: what most should do

For almost every business that sells products, the answer isn't to pick one. It's to use the marketplace to be found by people who don't know you yet, and your own store to keep the ones who already do.

In practice, that means:

• Synced catalog and inventory, so you don't sell the same item twice.
• In the packaging and after the sale, a clear reason to make the next purchase in your store: lower shipping, a coupon, a repeat-purchase program.
• A store that's fast on mobile. We've already shown with Nuvemshop data how speed affects conversion, and in an online store every second weighs on the cart.
• SEO and GEO from day one, with product structured data, a sitemap, and llms.txt, so the store shows up on Google and in ChatGPT answers when someone searches for what you sell.

That way, the marketplace commission becomes the cost of acquiring new customers, not a tax on all your revenue.

What this means for you

Before you decide, set aside an hour and run three numbers on your sales from the last 6 months:

1. How much you paid in commissions and fixed fees. Add it all up, by channel. Many businesses have never seen that full number.
2. How many orders came from customers who had bought before. That's the revenue that could be in your own store.
3. What your average ticket is. If it's above R$200, the 2026 rules hit your cash flow harder.

If the commission on repeat purchases pays for your own store in a few months, the math is done.

At the Studio, we build websites and online stores at a fixed price after discovery, with the deadline written into the contract and code, files, and accounts in the client's name. The sites we ship in custom code launch with structured data, a sitemap, and llms.txt from day one. If your business wants to stop paying commission on customers who are already yours, see how we work on websites and online stores.