The sellers who’ve been quietly absorbing punishing platform fees finally got a seat at the table.

Indonesia’s Trade Minister Budi Santoso sat down with marketplace operators and merchant representatives in Jakarta on Tuesday. The agenda: figure out why so many sellers feel like they’re building someone else’s business while paying their own bills.

The talks are feeding directly into a revision of Trade Ministry Regulation No. 31 of 2023, which governs the licensing, advertising, and supervision of e-commerce businesses in Indonesia. The ministry says the revised rules have reached the final stage of regulatory harmonisation, which in government language means something may actually happen soon.

Sellers Got a Microphone, Finally

Merchant representatives were given the floor to spell out what’s been eating into their margins. Grievances ranged across platform policies and opaque service fee structures, issues that many sellers have been raising in seller forums for years without much official acknowledgement.

“We cannot solve the issues instantly. All input has been accommodated, and we expect a shared commitment to build a fair e-commerce ecosystem.” — Trade Minister Budi Santoso

That framing is refreshingly honest for a government statement. It does not promise a fix. It promises to have heard the problem, which for sellers who’ve felt invisible to regulators, is at least a start.

The ministry also wants a joint action plan in place before the revised regulation is finalised, pulling in both platforms and sellers to co-sign the implementation process. Whether that means anything in practice remains to be seen, but it signals Jakarta is trying not to hand one side a win over the other.

The Fee Problem Nobody Printed Until Now

Part of what makes Indonesian sellers so frustrated is that the fee gap between platforms is enormous, and the total cost of doing business online is not always obvious upfront. This is what sellers across the country are actually navigating:

The transparency issue isn’t just about the headline percentage. Sellers on some platforms pay additional fees for promotional programs, free-shipping subsidies, and mall-tier services, costs that compound quickly. That’s exactly what the revised regulation is aiming to address by introducing clearer transparency requirements for digital commerce platforms.

TikTok Shop and Tokopedia: The Elephant With Two Heads

Any honest account of Indonesia’s marketplace landscape has to reckon with one of the more unusual corporate stitchups in Southeast Asian tech history. After TikTok Shop was effectively banned in Indonesia in late 2023 for operating social commerce without a proper licence, ByteDance bought a 75% stake in Tokopedia to get back in the door legally.

The result is a hybrid platform where Indonesian sellers list on TikTok Shop and Tokopedia simultaneously. Since May 18, 2026, the merged entity has been quietly rolling out what it calls “Platform Commission Savings,” a nod to the seller community that the old fee structure had some rough edges. It’s a meaningful concession. It’s also worth noting that this voluntary adjustment happened right as the government was loudly talking about compulsory transparency rules.

The timing, as they say, is not a coincidence.

The Local Products Argument

Santoso didn’t frame the regulation push purely as a merchant welfare story. He tied it directly to Indonesia’s trade ambitions. If local products can’t compete on their own platforms because foreign goods are priced lower after import dumping and platform algorithms favour the lowest-cost listing, domestic manufacturers lose ground at home before they ever think about exporting.

“We want local products to grow. If local products become more competitive and maintain good quality, we can better control imports,” the minister said.

This is Indonesia trying to use its massive domestic market, over 270 million people, as both a carrot and a stick. Platforms want access to that market. Jakarta knows it. The revised regulation is partly about extracting a price for that access in the form of better treatment of local sellers.

What Comes Next

The revised regulation is nearing its final harmonisation stage, meaning inter-ministry sign-off. Once that’s done, the joint action plan will determine how platforms actually implement the new transparency and local product protection requirements. There’s no hard deadline in the public statements, but the political pressure is real enough that platforms are already adjusting their fee structures preemptively.

Sellers, for their part, are watching. The government has called a meeting and made a speech. The real test is whether the regulation lands with teeth.

Our Take

Consultation Is Not Reform

Indonesia is doing something most large markets haven’t managed: treating e-commerce regulation as a trade policy issue, not just a consumer protection one. That’s the right instinct. The problem has never been that marketplaces exist. The problem is that platforms with dominant market positions can set fee structures, algorithm rules, and promotional obligations that effectively act as a private tax on sellers who have no alternative but to comply.

The TikTok-Tokopedia saga is proof that even a complete regulatory intervention can get absorbed and restructured by a well-resourced platform player. What Indonesia needs from this revision isn’t just transparency disclosures that sellers have to read in a PDF buried in a help centre. It needs enforceable fee caps or at least mandatory comparative fee disclosures that let sellers actually compare costs across platforms before committing their inventory.

Getting platforms and sellers in the same room is worth something. But the next meeting that matters is the one where the final regulation text is published. That document will tell you whether this was real reform or a very well-run consultation exercise.