Vietnam's E-Commerce Says Goodbye to Cheap: Platforms Raise Fees, Sellers Raise Prices, Shoppers Pull Back

[Vietnam's E-Commerce Says Goodbye to Cheap: Platforms Raise Fees, Sellers Raise Prices, Shoppers Pull Back]

On paper, Vietnamese e-commerce had another excellent year. The two research firms that track the market most closely, YouNet ECI and Metric, put full-year growth at somewhere between twenty and thirty-five percent — far ahead of overall retail — and the big categories like FMCG and fashion kept posting higher sales. Looking at that alone, you'd say nothing is wrong.

The turn came in the fourth quarter of 2025. That quarter, average selling prices across the platforms ran a third higher than a year earlier, while the number of items sold fell by nearly a tenth. Transaction value is still climbing, but more and more of the growth comes from higher prices, not from people buying more.

Why are prices rising? YouNet ECI's read is blunt: sellers are reacting to round after round of platform fee increases through 2025.

For a decade, Vietnamese e-commerce ran on burning money for scale. Whoever attracted more users and more orders won, and platforms subsidized free shipping, vouchers and cashback heavily to make it happen; growth came first, profit was a problem for later. In 2025 the market flipped from land-grab to rent collection: Shopee repeatedly adjusted its fixed fees and category service fees, and TikTok Shop moved its commissions and operating policies in step.

Policy tightened at the same time. Since the middle of last year, sellers no longer file their own platform taxes — platforms now collect revenue data and withhold tax on their behalf. Late last year Vietnam also passed its first dedicated E-Commerce Law, requiring seller identity verification and putting responsibility on the platforms; it took effect this July. The room for doing business behind vague identities and goods of unclear origin keeps shrinking.

For sellers, all of this lands on costs. Beyond the goods themselves, every order now carries platform fees, advertising, logistics, returns, taxes and compliance overhead. Vietnamese financial outlet CafeF describes where those costs go: they don't stop with the seller. They get pushed, bit by bit, into list prices, shallower discounts, weaker vouchers and free-shipping thresholds that are harder to reach.

Part of that bill ends up with consumers, and consumers answered by buying less. These are price-sensitive shoppers to begin with — younger buyers have limited incomes, and years of discount wars trained them to compare prices and wait for coupons. CafeF's reporting adds a warning: a thirty- or forty-percent-off tag no longer guarantees a bargain. If the list price was raised first, or shipping fees and voucher conditions claw the savings back at checkout, the discount just softens the increase.

Rising prices and cautious buyers squeeze small sellers first. In early 2025, tens of thousands of shops went a whole quarter without a single order and drifted out of the market; in the same quarter, the number of large sellers nearly doubled. Over the full year, the total count of shops with any sales shrank while the average survivor did more business. Official flagship stores are the extreme case: a tiny fraction of all shops, yet they take more than a quarter of revenue on the two biggest platforms.

Lazada's numbers from this year's mid-year sale point the same way: nearly eighty percent of its orders came through LazMall, its authentic-goods channel, at a higher average order value than a year earlier.

The platform map is shifting too. On last year's full-year count, Shopee still held close to sixty percent of sales and remains the market leader, though its growth is showing signs of slowing. TikTok Shop, built on short video and livestream selling, has climbed past forty percent — and during this year's Tet sale season, its campaign revenue overtook Shopee's for the first time. Everyone else splits the scraps. For sellers still in the game, including Taiwanese merchants selling cross-border into Vietnam, the message is clear: the platform question has a different answer than it did three years ago, and selling through short video and livestreams is no longer optional.

The compliance bar is the other filter pushing small sellers out. Identity verification plus platform tax withholding is bad news for operations built on rotating accounts and unverifiable goods; for brands selling authentic products that can absorb the full cost structure, the field is getting cleaner. CafeF quotes a view shared by many analysts: being cheap is no longer what decides winners — the sellers who stay will be the ones who create more value on the same order, whether through product quality, brand, shopping experience or tighter cost control.

Vietnam's e-commerce hasn't stalled; growth is still there. What changed is how it grows: volume pumped up by subsidies is giving way to revenue held up by higher prices, authentic goods and the compliant sellers left standing. "Buying online is always cheaper" now comes with an asterisk. And anyone staying in this market will have to get used to one where subsidies no longer cover the gap, and every cost has to be counted.

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