On Shopee, I Follow Every Rule.
The Seller Beside Me Follows None.

Same shelf, different rulebook

There’s an argument doing the rounds in Malaysian business circles right now: view cross-border e-commerce with openness, don’t sit there benefiting from the platforms and then complain about them. Don’t, as the saying goes, eat the meat from the bowl and then put down the chopsticks to curse. I have sympathy for it. Protectionism isn’t a strategy, and complaining isn’t a business plan.

But there’s a difference between complaining about competition and pointing out that the referee is only checking one team’s boots. I’m not asking to be protected from the overseas seller. I’m asking to be measured by the same rulebook he is — and today I’m not.

Credit where it’s due: the tax gap has mostly closed

I want to be fair, because the honest version of this argument is stronger than the angry one. The biggest historical complaint — that imported goods dodged tax while I paid it — is largely fixed.

Since 1 January 2024, Malaysia charges a 10% sales tax on imported low-value goods (RM500 and below) sold online, and the obligation falls on the overseas seller and the marketplace, not just on local businesses. It works: the low-value-goods tax brought in about RM817 million last year, up from RM476 million the year before. On tax alone, for everyday online purchases, the field is closer to level than it has ever been. Anyone still arguing purely on tax is fighting the last war.

The gap that didn’t close: everything that isn’t tax

Here is what LVG didn’t touch, and where the real asymmetry lives. To put a regulated electrical product on a shelf as a Malaysian seller, I carry a stack the overseas seller simply skips:

Certification. A regulated electrical item — a charger, an adaptor, a kettle — needs ST-SIRIM certification before I can legally sell it. That’s cost, testing, and weeks of time. The cross-border seller ships the identical item uncertified, and it lists anyway. This isn’t theoretical: the government’s own recent inspections found more than half of the phone chargers on sale weren’t ST-SIRIM certified. Half the shelf is playing by rules I’m forced to follow and they’re not.

The rest of the stack. Business registration. Income tax on profits, not just sales tax on the item. Consumer-protection obligations, warranties, returns, a real address a customer can complain to. Labelling and language requirements. I comply with all of it because I’m reachable — I’m here. The overseas drop-shipper is a storefront that can close and reopen under a new name by Friday.

So the competition isn’t “their product is cheaper.” Fair enough if it is. The competition is “their product skips the compliance cost mine is legally required to carry” — and a chunk of that skipped cost is the exact safety testing that stops a charger from starting a fire.

Why the platform is the missing lever

Ask why the authorities don’t just stop this, and you hit the structural answer I keep coming back to: enforcement is aimed at importers and sellers, not at the platforms — and in cross-border e-commerce, the seller is a moving target overseas while the platform is the one fixed, reachable point in the whole chain.

The marketplace is the chokepoint. It decides what gets listed, it takes the payment, it controls the shelf. Yet it isn’t made responsible for whether a regulated product it lists is certified. The government just announced a seven-agency “special compliance operation” to chase non-compliant electrical imports — Customs, the Energy Commission, SIRIM, KPDN and more. Seven agencies chasing millions of parcels and anonymous overseas sellers. That’s the hard way, and it will always be losing a step.

The easy way is already proven. Malaysia didn’t collect RM817 million of LVG tax by chasing individual overseas sellers — it made the platforms collect it. The moment the obligation sat on the marketplace, compliance became the default instead of the exception. Apply exactly that logic to safety: no valid ST-SIRIM certification, no listing. Put the duty on the one party that can actually enforce it at the point of sale. We have the mechanism. We’ve run it once already and it worked. We just haven’t pointed it at certification.

The EU just made a platform pay for exactly this

While we argue about it, someone else acted. On 20 July 2026 the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million (about US$630 million) under its Digital Services Act — the largest penalty the DSA has ever issued. Not for a tax gap. The Commission’s finding was that the platform failed to adequately assess and mitigate the risks of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its shelves, overstated how well its own moderation worked, and lacked effective mechanisms to detect fakes and to stop sellers from slipping non-compliant goods past its checks by miscategorising them.

Read that again with a Malaysian charger in your hand. The EU didn’t chase ten thousand anonymous overseas sellers one parcel at a time. It put the bill on the one fixed, reachable party in the chain — the marketplace — for the safety of what it lists. That is the exact lever I’m describing, pulled at scale by a regulator that decided the platform is accountable for its own shelf. And AliExpress isn’t alone: the same law has already fined Temu €200 million and X €120 million. A live, working template now exists.

AliExpress calls the fine “disproportionate” and has until October to file a compliance plan, so this will be contested — I’m not pretending a single fine is a magic wand. But the principle is now established in black and white somewhere that matters: make the platform answer for whether what it sells is safe and certified. Malaysia doesn’t need to invent this. It needs to decide it’s worth doing — and it already owns the mechanism, because that is exactly how it collected the LVG tax.

“Open” done right

Back to the openness argument, because I don’t want to dodge it. Openness is correct. Cross-border e-commerce gives Malaysian consumers cheaper goods and Malaysian sellers access to the region — my own operations run into China and the US precisely because those markets are open to me. I don’t want walls. Walls would make me poorer too.

But “open” has to mean same rules for everyone on the shelf, not no rules for whoever ships from furthest away. An open market with asymmetric rules isn’t free trade — it’s a subsidy for non-compliance, paid for by the sellers who followed the law and, eventually, by the customer who buys the charger that wasn’t tested. You can be fully pro-openness and still insist the rulebook applies evenly. Those aren’t in tension. They’re the same principle.

The bottom line

I’m not putting down my chopsticks to curse. I eat at these platforms every day and I’m grateful they exist. I’m saying the meal is being served on a tilted table, and the fix isn’t to flip it over — it’s to make it level, using a lever Malaysia has already pulled successfully once.

Published by IMA AI — July 2026. We sell on these platforms every day — this is written from the seller’s side of the shelf, not the stands.