How to sell online in the Philippines as a beginner

You've got the product, you've got a few followers, and someone just commented "hm po?" on your third post. Now what.

Now you decide three things, and none of them is a website.

You decide where you'll take orders, how people will pay, and how the parcel reaches a house that may not have a street number. In the Philippines the honest defaults are: orders in the comments and the DMs, payment on delivery with GCash as the alternative, and a courier who will call the buyer before he finds the place. A ₱650 crochet bucket hat sold on COD costs you nothing in payment fees and costs you real money every time a parcel comes back. That tension is most of what running a small Philippine shop is about.

Where your buyers already are

Not on your website. Almost certainly on Facebook, in a buy-and-sell group for your city or your niche, and in the comments of a live. Some of them are on Instagram and TikTok, and the ones on TikTok found you because a video did well and not because they were shopping.

That shapes everything. Your buyer is not searching, they're scrolling, and the moment between "cute" and "mine po" is about four seconds long. Anything that makes them leave the app to find out a price is a sale you paid attention for and then lost.

So the job is: price visible where they are, and one tap to order. If your bio link opens a page of more links, you've added a step for no reason.

Cash on delivery is the default, not the fallback

If you're used to reading American selling advice, COD sounds like a workaround for people who can't get a card. In Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao and everywhere else here, it's just how buying works. Shopee and Lazada spent a decade training the whole country that a parcel arrives and then you pay for it. A shop that won't do COD reads as a shop that might not send anything.

It converts brilliantly because it removes the buyer's only real fear. They're not worried about card fraud. They're worried about paying a stranger and getting nothing.

Then it sends you the bill, in three parts:

What it costs	How it shows up
Refused and unclaimed parcels	You pay freight out and freight back, and the item comes home creased
Remittance delay	The courier holds your money for days after delivery, so your cash is in a van
Handling fee	A percentage or flat charge on the collected amount, deducted before you're paid

The refusal number is the one that decides whether COD is survivable for you. Work it out against your margin, not against your price. If a ₱650 hat has ₱260 of yarn and time in it and a round trip costs ₱180, then one refusal in eight eats a third of your profit on the other seven. If you sell ₱2,500 bags, you can absorb it. If you sell ₱200 accessories, COD will quietly bankrupt you and you should either bundle to a higher basket or take payment upfront.

Cash on delivery for small sellers goes through refusal rates, change, and when to ask for a deposit instead of arguing about it.

GCash: what it is, and what it isn't

GCash and Maya are how Filipinos send each other money. Rent, utang, tuition, and yes, orders. The buyer sends to your number, screenshots the receipt, and sends you the screenshot.

Two things to be clear about.

First, that's a person-to-person transfer, not a checkout. Nothing tells your shop the money arrived. You check your own app. That's fine, it's just work, and the work is yours.

Second, and this is the one that costs people stock: a screenshot is a picture. Editing a GCash receipt takes about ninety seconds and people do it. Open your own app and find the actual credit before you pack anything. If a buyer is pushing you to ship before you've checked, that pressure is itself the signal.

The good half is that GCash costs you nothing and settles instantly, which for a made-to-order seller is the difference between buying yarn this week and buying it next week.

Take a down payment on anything you have to make. Fifty percent on a made-to-order bag isn't rudeness, it's the reason you can afford the yarn.

The buyer who doesn't have GCash

You'll meet them, mostly provincial and mostly older. They'll offer to send it through a remittance counter instead, and you should say yes rather than lose the order.

Two things to sort before you agree. Ask which branch they're near, because they pay the sending fee and it varies, and tell them plainly whether that fee is on top of the item price or comes out of it. And get the reference number and the exact sender name, spelled the way it appears on their ID, because you can't collect without both and "my auntie sent it" is not a name.

The money is claimable within hours, so this isn't slow. It's just a trip, for them and sometimes for you, and it's worth it on a ₱1,200 order and not worth it on a ₱200 one.

The address is the part that breaks

Everyone obsesses over product photos. Then a ₱1,200 bag comes back because the rider couldn't find a house.

Philippine addresses are frequently landmark-based, and a courier's system wants a street. So the fields you actually need from a buyer are: complete address including barangay and city, a working mobile number, and a landmark. "Blue gate, katapat ng sari-sari store, second street after the basketball court" gets a parcel delivered when "123 Mabini St" does not.

The rider will call. If the buyer doesn't pick up, he'll try again, and then it goes back. So the mobile number is not a formality, it's the delivery mechanism. Ask for it, confirm it, and message the buyer the day the parcel is out with a "please answer an unknown number today" note. That one message measurably reduces returns and takes ten seconds.

Worked example: Rhea, crochet bags, Cebu City

Rhea crochets bucket hats at ₱650 and shoulder bags at ₱1,200. She sells through Instagram and a Cebu buy-and-sell group, about 45 orders a month, roughly two thirds inside Cebu and the rest shipped to Luzon and Mindanao.

Her rules, which took her four months of getting it wrong to arrive at:

• COD available for ready stock only. Made-to-order needs 50% down via GCash before she casts on.
• Cebu City deliveries go by a rider she books herself, ₱120 flat, same day if ordered before noon.
• Provincial goes by courier, ₱180 to ₱260 depending on where, quoted before she confirms.
• Every order gets a number. Every GCash payment gets checked in the app, never on the screenshot.
• She restocks and posts new colours on the 14th and the 29th.

That last one is not decoration. Philippine paydays cluster on the 15th and the end of the month, and Rhea's sales roughly double in the three days after each. She used to drop new batches whenever she finished them, including on the 8th, and watched good work sit for a week. Now she finishes on the 12th and posts on the 14th. Same product, same photos, noticeably different week.

Her monthly numbers: about ₱42,000 of goods. Payment processing cost: ₱0, because there's no processor. COD losses: two or three refused parcels a month, around ₱500 in wasted freight. Her single biggest cost after materials is her own time confirming payments and chasing riders, which is roughly forty minutes a day.

Live selling and comment-claiming

Live selling is a genuine channel here, not a novelty. Someone goes live, holds up an item, and buyers type "mine" in the comments. First "mine" wins.

It works because it compresses discovery, trust and decision into one minute. It falls apart in the hour afterwards, when you have 60 comments, 14 of which say "mine" on the same item, three of which are joking, and no record of who owes what.

The discipline that makes it survivable: number every item before you go live, say the number out loud, and require the comment to include it. Then screenshot the comment thread the moment the live ends, before Facebook reorders it. Reconcile from the screenshot, not from memory, and send every winner a message with the item, the price and the payment instruction within the hour. Claims go cold fast. Selling in comments without losing track covers the whole workflow.

Registering, BIR, and the honest answer

Two separate obligations, and people conflate them.

Registering a business name gets you a name nobody else can use and lets you open accounts and deal with suppliers as a business. Tax registration is a different process, and income tax applies to what you earn whether or not you've registered anything.

I'm not going to print current thresholds, fee figures or a list of required documents, because those change and an out-of-date number here could cost you money. Check dti.gov.ph for business name registration and bir.gov.ph for tax, or pay a bookkeeper in your city for an hour before you assume you're under a line. The hour is cheap.

What you can and should do from your very first order, with no registration at all: keep every order in one list with a date, an amount and a buyer, and don't pay for materials from the same wallet you buy lunch with. That record is the thing you'll wish you had. Keeping track of who has paid is the practical version.

Where Sailo fits, and where it plainly doesn't

Sailo gives you the page the comments and DMs are missing. A link like sailo.store/yourname, live the moment you sign up, with every item, every colour option and every price on it, and an order button that opens WhatsApp or Instagram with the item, the options, the address and the total already written out. No more typing "₱650 po, ready stock" forty times. Cash on delivery is a rail, with a free-text notes field where you should write your delivery areas and your rider-will-call warning. Sailo takes nothing on COD or chat orders, because on those it never touches the money.

Now the limits, and the first one is significant for you specifically.

There is no GCash rail and there won't be one. The complete list of payment rails is card, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer and cash on delivery. What you can do is put your GCash number and QR into the bank transfer instructions field with the exact reference you want, and confirm it yourself in the GCash app. Plenty of sellers run exactly that way. Be honest with yourself about what it is: Sailo holds the catalogue and the order record, your phone holds the money.

Card payments aren't available to you at all. Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe, and when I checked Stripe's own global availability page in August 2026 the Philippines wasn't listed on it. Upgrading to the $49 Business plan will not produce a card button in a country Stripe doesn't cover. That's not a gap you can pay your way out of, and any tool telling you otherwise is describing a different country.

The free plan caps at 10 products. Two hat colours and four bag colours is six. Forty preloved items, each unique, is not going to fit, and that's a real constraint for anyone doing ukay or thrift.

What to do next

Take the last twenty messages where someone asked a question and didn't order. Write down the question each time. You'll find the same four: how much, is it available, how much shipping to my area, is COD available.

Put those four answers on one page today. Then message every buyer whose parcel goes out tomorrow with a single line asking them to answer an unknown number, and see what happens to your return rate over the next fortnight.

If you're weighing up COD against asking for payment first, why cash on delivery dominates some markets explains what's actually driving it, and how to take payment as a small seller lays out what every other rail costs you.