You cannot join Shopee without paying the deposit.

The deposit is actually just a content to constrain the responsibilities of both parties. If the merchant wants to get out of it unscathed, the deposit can still be returned. However, for merchants who are still on the sidelines, the deposit rules may affect their decisions. Whether to leave or stay depends on what kind of preferential conditions the platform can offer.

Here Shopee is more about constraining merchants, and the support for new merchants is not very obvious. Moreover, Shopee is now limiting the number of goods that merchants can put on the shelves, which is very unfriendly to some companies in the retail industry.