Selling online in Taiwan or Asia: start here
Updated
TL;DR: Building the store is the quick part. Our three stores went live in 1, 3 and 4 days. What slowed us down was getting paid: Stripe and Shopify Payments don't support Taiwan, and one of our stores took a little over three weeks to go from its first payment gateway to steady card payments. Ads were the other surprise. Two of our stores are still losing money on Meta, and the numbers are below. This page sorts what we've learned by the problem you're facing.
Our three stores
All three belong to RedClaw. Figures as of 2026-10-07; NT$31 ≈ US$1.
Taolilife: dried peaches
A single product, researched, specced and launched on the same day.
- Paid orders: 38, worth NT$35,279
- Meta ROAS: about 0.78 (our estimate; still losing money)
Maomuse: custom pet portraits
Live in 3 days. Search traffic grew quickly, but most clicks went to a pet-name tool and pet-loss guides, a long way from buying.
- Google clicks per month: 79 → 1,281 (July to September)
- Confirmed paid orders: 2, worth NT$663
ONAÏ: Korean pre-order fashion
A review-ready store in 4 days. Checkout stays closed until the payment application goes in.
- Mobile Lighthouse: 97–100
- Automated checks: 107 of 107 passing on the regression run
Find what you're stuck on
Getting paid without a Taiwan entity
Taiwan isn't on Stripe's supported-country list. We use a US LLC and had live Stripe keys the day we applied. How we set it up, what it costs per charge, and what we got wrong.
Local payment gateways
Many Taiwanese shoppers expect to pay at a convenience store or by ATM transfer, which Stripe doesn't offer here. ECPay does, but its official pages don't say whether a foreigner can open a personal account.
Picking a platform
Shopify, WooCommerce and the Taiwanese platforms (SHOPLINE, CYBERBIZ, EasyStore) compared on fees, commission and how much SEO you can control, from official documentation. We haven't run stores on these platforms ourselves; this is a document comparison.
When ads spend but orders don't show up
Meta reported 65 purchases for our dried-peach store; 34 real paid orders came from Meta. Reconcile before you scale.
Lessons series: where the money went
Each entry follows the same four steps: the numbers at the time, where we lost money, what we changed, and the numbers after. Updated monthly until the stores break even.
Existing resources
Earlier e-commerce ad material on this site:
- E-commerce ad budget guide: work out ad budget from the margin left on each order.
- E-commerce audience guide: purchase-based lookalikes, RFM segments and dynamic retargeting.
- E-commerce creative guide: dynamic product ads, UGC and seasonal creative planning.
- E-commerce tracking guide: catalog events, cart abandonment and multi-channel attribution.
- Meta vs Google for e-commerce: where each platform fits for an online store.
Want a second pair of eyes on your store?
Tell us on Telegram where you're stuck: payments, tracking, ads or SEO. What we offer is on the e-commerce service page.