Shopee

Is Shopee safe to use?

For payments, mostly yes. For product quality, be careful. Shopee holds your money in escrow under Garantia Shopee until you confirm the order arrived as described, so a parcel that never comes is usually refunded. The trouble lies with third-party sellers: the US Trade Representative listed Shopee as a notorious market for counterfeits in its 2024 review, and Brazilian consumer agencies have fined it twice since late 2025. We score it 44/100, level with AliExpress (44) and just above Temu (42), and well below Mercado Libre.

Counterfeits by country

Shopee is not one shop but a set of country sites run by Sea Limited, covering Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brazil. USTR's 2024 review, published in January 2025, found the fake-goods problem "appears to vary widely" between them. Brand owners praised the Taiwan site, but reported "serious concerns" about the volume of counterfeits in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and across Latin America.

The same review credited Shopee with real work: an IP portal for brand owners that now covers every country site, a keyword blacklist, stronger seller identity checks in some markets, and a 100% removal rate for listings of counterfeit medicines reported by one industry group. Its main complaint was a points-based repeat infringer policy that let reported sellers keep trading. Shopee does not appear in USTR's 2025 review, published in March 2026.

Brazil's regulators see the same pattern. Procon-SP signed an agreement with Shopee in December 2021 that banned counterfeit and smuggled goods and required invoices, after 1,200 complaints in six months. In November 2025 Procon-RJ fined Shopee about R$200,000 after finding counterfeit clothing, footwear, cosmetics and electronics, many listed with real brand photos at prices no genuine product could match. Shopee can still present a defence.

What the app does with your data

Shopee's App Store label is one of the broader ones we have seen on a shopping app. It says three types of data may be used to track you across other companies' apps and websites: purchases, contact info and usage data. Payment info, precise location, home address, email, phone number, your phone's contacts, search and browsing history, and a category Apple calls "sensitive info" are linked to your identity. Brazil and Singapore list the same items.

Security records are thin, and the one regulator finding is not reassuring. In March 2023 Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau listed Shopee's Taiwan site among the two highest-risk shopping platforms for customer data leaks, after fraud victims reported callers who knew their order details. On 30 May 2023 the Ministry of Digital Affairs fined Shopee NT$200,000 (about $6,500), its first such fine against a private company, because Shopee had not taken adequate security measures for personal data and had not fixed them by the deadline. We found no public bug bounty programme on HackerOne.

Fines in Brazil, Vietnam and Taiwan

None of the fines is large on its own, but they come from several countries in a short time:

The Procon-SP fine is the biggest. It found clauses in Shopee's terms of service that it called abusive, and that the site did not give essential contact information required by Brazil's e-commerce rules. Shopee can still defend itself in the administrative process. In Vietnam, Shopee had to publish a correction on its site, app and social media, which it did in May 2026. Indonesia's competition authority, KPPU, examined whether Shopee steered buyers to its own courier, Shopee Xpress. Shopee admitted the breach in June 2024 and agreed to behavioural commitments, and KPPU closed the case in November 2024 without a fine.

How to shop on Shopee more safely

1. Pay only inside the app, and never move a chat to WhatsApp or pay a seller by Pix or bank transfer outside Shopee.
2. Buy branded goods from official brand stores, and treat deep discounts on famous brands as a sign of a fake.
3. Check the shop's age, ratings and follower count, and read reviews with photos.
4. Do not confirm receipt until you have opened and checked the item; once you confirm, the seller is paid.
5. Deny location and contacts access in your phone settings. The app works without them.

How we scored it

Privacy (36) is the weakest factor, because the label lets purchase and contact data be used for tracking. Scams and harmful content (40) reflects counterfeit findings by USTR and Procon-RJ, softened by the escrow guarantee. The regulatory record (55) counts four fines in three countries since 2023; none is large, and the biggest is still open to a defence. Security (50) is middling, held back by Taiwan's data leak finding and little published on how accounts are protected.