Direct Tax
Consulting
ESG Advisory
Indirect Tax
Growth Advisory
Internal Audit
BFSI Audit
Industry Audit
Valuation
RBI Services
SEBI Services
IRDA Registration
AML Advisory
IBC Services
Recovery of Shares
NBFC Compliance
IRDA Compliance
Finance & Accounts
Payroll Compliance Services
HR Outsourcing
LPO
Fractional CFO
General Legal
Corporate Law
Debt Recovery
Select Your Location
E-commerce in Indonesia is where a young, mobile-first population, numerous payment options, and a rapidly evolving tax regime all converge. For anyone building or expanding an online store, the real challenge is less “is there demand?” and more “can you speak the local payment language, keep up with Indonesia sales tax on ecommerce, and actually get orders delivered across 17,000 islands?”
This guide offers an in-depth overview of operating an e-commerce business in Indonesia, covering payment gateways, taxes and logistics.
Indonesia is now one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world, driven by:
From a practical standpoint, that means:
Company registration in Indonesia is an excellent choice for entrepreneurs worldwide.
Digital wallets and bank transfers are the primary form of payment in Indonesia, in both offline markets and on e-commerce platforms. This is the distribution amongst various payment methods:
So, a “local‑ready” checkout for e-commerce in Indonesia normally includes:
Here are the main payment methods being used by the Indonesian people. Knowing this is key to starting and maintaining an e-commerce business in Indonesia, to understand user behavior:
Digital wallet is the default payment method for many Indonesian shoppers. Key names include:
Most are integrated into the national QRIS (QR Code Indonesian Standard) system, which lets customers pay by scanning a single QR regardless of the underlying wallet or bank.
For you, the good news is that you usually do not integrate each wallet one by one; your Indonesia payment gateway presents them as a bundle.
Bank transfers are still a major part of e-commerce in Indonesia:
Gateways like Xendit, Midtrans, DOKU, and others specialize in bundling VA payments across multiple banks, so you do not have to negotiate bank by bank.
Cards matter, but they are not king:
If your target audience is urban, higher income, or crossborder, you still want Visa/Mastercard acceptance. But you should not rely on cards alone for conversion.
Cash on delivery (COD) exists outside the biggest cities and for lower trust categories, but its share has dropped as wallets and transfers became easier and safer.
Overthecounter payments at convenience stores (Alfamart, Indomaret) and similar locations are also supported by some gateways, giving unbanked or cashheavy customers a way to pay for online orders offline.
An Indonesian payment gateway is your bridge into all these methods. The big criteria are:
Well‑known gateways and payment platforms active in Indonesia include:
Most serious e-commerce in Indonesia lives on top of one or more of these, rather than direct integrations one by one.
Indonesia does not have a separate e-commerce tax, but VAT and related rules have been extended directly into the digital space.
Indonesia operates a VAT (sometimes described as GST) system:
For local Indonesian ecommerce businesses, this means:
Indonesia has specifically targeted foreign sellers of digital goods and services to Indonesian consumers:
If you run a SaaS or digital subscription aimed at Indonesian consumers from outside the country, this regime is your main Indonesia sales tax ecommerce concern.
An E-Commerce seller mostly concern itself about Indonesian tax registration broadly, consider two scenarios:
If you operate through an Indonesian company or have sufficient presence there, you will:
You will also be subject to corporate income tax on profits, withholding obligations on certain payments, and potentially local taxes.
If you sell physical goods from abroad into Indonesia, your main tax exposure is often at the border (import duties, VAT, and customs for the importer of record), plus any permanent‑establishment risks if your operations become too “present” in Indonesia.
If you sell digital goods and services, the digital VAT regime kicks in once you meet the criteria and are appointed as a VAT collector. At that point, you must:
Ignoring this can lead to designation and public listing as a non‑compliant provider, which is not great for brand or expansion plans.
Indonesian logistics is where a lot of e-commerce models either work beautifully or start leaking margin.
Several large logistics and courier companies handle-commerce deliveries nationwide:
Most serious commerce in Indonesia uses:
Cash‑on‑delivery sounds attractive in a lower‑trust, cash‑heavy environment, but:
By providing better discounts or other incentives such as free delivery, many brands gradually encourage loyal customers to switch to prepaid methods (wallets, transfers, and BNPL) after experimenting with COD early on.
Depending on your scale, you might:
The key is matching your order density and product type to a logistics model that does not destroy your margins with high inter‑island shipping costs.
In e-commerce in Indonesia, marketplaces are impossible to ignore:
A common pattern:
When you add your own store, you replicate some of the marketplace experience:
Putting this together, a sensible roadmap for launching an ecommerce business in Indonesia looks like:
E-commerce in Indonesia is not a mystery market; it is a mobile‑first, wallet‑heavy, VAT‑active environment. If you treat Indonesia payment gateways, tax, and logistics as first‑class design decisions rather than afterthoughts, you give your store a much better chance of being more than just another listing lost in a crowded marketplace.
To know more the about E-Commerce business in India and how to run it in a compliant way, visit Enterslice.
Indonesia's e-commerce market size varies within or close to the $50 billion to $90 billion range for 2024/2025, with projections showing rapid growth towards $90-$100+ billion by 2028-2030.
Indonesian shoppers do not behave like typical card first Western customers. In practice, that means you need to offer major e-wallets (Go Pay, OVO, DANA, Shopee Pay), bank VA payments, and optionally BNPL and COD if you want to see strong conversion outside a narrow urban elite. Recent breakdowns of e-commerce payments show digital wallets accounting for roughly a third of online transactions, bank transfers and virtual accounts in another quarter, cards a much smaller slice, and the rest spread across BNPL and cash on delivery.
Digital wallets are often the first “bank account” Indonesians really use day to day, because they pair perfectly with smartphones and socialcommerce flows. National QRIS (QR Code Indonesian Standard) stitches these wallets and banks together: a merchant can show a single QR and accept payments from many different apps and bank accounts behind the scenes. Fore-commerce, this translates into quick, familiar, lowfriction payments at checkout, especially on mobile, where most Indonesian shoppers browse and buy.
Global providers that only offer cards and a couple of international wallets will technically work, but they will not match local habits. Indonesiafocused gateways bundle multiple local methods – ewallets, bank virtual accounts, retailstore cash payments, and sometimes BNPL – into a single integration, with pricing and settlement tuned to the local market. Platforms like Xendit, Midtrans, DOKU, and regional PSPs are widely used because they make it much easier for a foreign brand or new entrant to speak the same “payment language” as Indonesian customers from day one.
Indonesia operates an 11 per cent VAT system on most taxable goods and services, and online sales are very much part of that net. Local ecommerce businesses that exceed the registration threshold (or opt in) are expected to charge VAT on applicable sales and file regular VAT returns. On top of this, Indonesia has extended VAT to foreign providers of digital goods and services sold to Indonesian consumers: once appointed as a VAT collector, a foreign platform or SaaS provider must register under a simplified scheme, charge the applicable VAT rate (moving from 11 to 12 percent on digital services from early 2025), and remit it via periodic returns.
If you have no local entity but sell digital products or services (like apps, streaming, online courses, subscriptions) to Indonesian customers, Indonesia’s digital VAT rules look at your turnover and transaction volume into the country. Once you cross thresholds set by the tax authority, they can designate you as a VAT collector and publish your name on their list. From that point, you are expected to register under the simplified digital VAT regime, charge VAT on Indonesian B2C sales, and file and pay on the official schedule. Staying under the radar might work in the very short term, but for any meaningful volume, it quickly becomes a compliance and reputational risk.
COD used to be a dominant method for online purchases in Indonesia, especially outside the big cities, because it reduced perceived risk for first time buyers. As wallets and bank transfers became ubiquitous, COD’s share dropped but did not disappear; recent data still show single digit to low teens percentages of ecommerce transactions using COD. It can still help with acquisition in low trust or low banking segments, but it increases operational complexity, failed delivery rates, and fraud risk. Many merchants offer COD early on but gradually push returning customers toward prepaid methods with better promos or cheaper shipping.
Indonesia’s geography – thousands of islands, varying infrastructure quality, and a mix of urban megacities and remote areas – makes logistics genuinely challenging. Large national and regional couriers can reach most populated areas, but delivery times and costs vary widely by island and service level. For e-commerce operators, this means carefully choosing 3PL partners, deciding whether to centralize stock in a few hubs or decentralize it across multiple warehouses, and being honest at checkout about shipping times and costs. “Nationwide delivery” is possible, but not on identical terms everywhere.
Most brands treat Indonesian marketplaces as their onramp. Platforms like Tokopedia, Shopee, and Lazada come with builtin traffic, integrated local payments, and readymade logistics options, which lower the barrier to entry. Once you see consistent traction and understand what Indonesians actually buy from you, adding your own site (with local payment gateway integration and local shipping options) gives you better margins, firstparty data, and more control over brand and customer experience. In practice, many successful brands run both channels in parallel and optimize each for slightly different goals.
A realistic approach is to think in layers rather than trying to solve everything on day one. Start by validating demand on marketplaces or a lightweight D2C site while using a strong Indonesiafocused payment gateway to offer wallets, bank VAs, and cards from the start. As volume grows, invest in better logistics – multiple carriers, perhaps a 3PL warehouse in or near Jakarta, and clearer shipping SLAs across islands. In parallel, clarify your tax position: register for VAT if you operate locally, or monitor digital VAT thresholds if you sell crossborder digital services. Finally, keep watching how Indonesian customers actually pay and receive orders, and adjust your payment mix, COD policy, and fulfilment model based on real data rather than assumptions imported from other markets.
E-commerce in Indonesia is where a young, mobile-first population, numerous payment o...
Indonesia's annual company compliance is essentially a yearly health check with the t...
Are you human?: 9 + 9 =
Easy Payment Options Available No Spam. No Sharing. 100% Confidentiality
Indonesia's annual company compliance is essentially a yearly health check with the tax office, BKPM/OSS,...
17 Dec, 2025
9870310368 
8860712800