Are Shopee's local stores reliable? What are local stores?

Shopee is an overseas e-commerce platform. Merchants can choose to open a multinational store on a site, or they can open a local store in their local area. However, some merchants think it is unreliable. So are Shopee's local stores reliable?

Shopee local stores are reliable.

What is a local store?

Local stores are stores opened using local personal information and local company registration accounts. For China, Southeast Asian countries are foreign countries. Similarly, for Southeast Asian consumers, China is a foreign country, so cross-border sellers refer to Chinese sellers. So the identity information or company registration may be local personal information, but it is not the local people who are behind it. However, most of them use third-party account information through service providers, which is not an official channel.

The main advantage of local accounts over cross-border accounts is that there are fewer restrictions on products and logistics, and the competition among local accounts is not as fierce as that among cross-border accounts. The conversion rate and traffic of local accounts will also be higher than those of cross-border accounts, but cross-border accounts can also have the same advantages as local accounts through overseas warehouses, but operating overseas warehouses is a greater test for product selection and funds.

In fact, it is not very difficult to obtain a local account. Some sites support opening a store with a passport. The most difficult part of this process is collecting payments. Local accounts cannot be used to collect payments through third-party tools. They need to use a local bank or corporate bank account to collect payments. However, most of the people in the market currently open stores and collect payments through service providers. There is no formal agreement signed, which has certain risks. At present, most cross-border sellers' local accounts are in a gray stage because they have not paid taxes or passed national policies.

Registering a local account mainly depends on the policies of the corresponding country. For example, the Philippine government requires that sellers can only register stores with local Philippine ID cards, otherwise the store will be blocked. For e-commerce platforms, the only demand is to allow Southeast Asian consumer groups to enjoy good products faster, so it is not very important whether the seller's account is cross-border or local. Now the platform is only using technology to detect whether it is a cross-border seller using local information, mainly to resolve the conflict between local sellers and cross-border sellers within the platform.

In general, Shopee local stores are reliable. However, there are certain risks in registering a local store. But now local stores have become a trend and are quite popular.