Where to sell, what it costs, how to actually get paid when most buyers want cash on delivery, and how to stop returns eating your margin.
Most guides to starting an online store in Pakistan are written as though the hard part is the website. It is not. Building a store has never been easier or cheaper; getting paid, getting the parcel delivered and getting the cash back out of the courier's system is where new sellers lose money. This guide follows the order things actually happen in — prove the product, pick where you sell, build, sort out payments and delivery, then market — and gives the real numbers at each step.
The cheapest version of this business is the one where you find out nobody wants the product before you have spent anything on it. Before you register a domain, sell a handful of units the manual way: a Facebook or Instagram page, a WhatsApp catalogue, or a listing on a marketplace. You are looking for two answers. Will strangers — not friends — pay your asking price? And what do they ask you before they buy?
That second answer is worth more than it sounds. The questions people ask you over WhatsApp in the first month are, almost word for word, the copy your product pages need and the FAQ your store should answer. Write them down as they come in.
It also helps to check demand is not purely seasonal or a passing trend before you commit to stock. A month of manual selling tells you more about that than any amount of research.
These are not rivals, they do different jobs.
The sensible path for most sellers is to use a marketplace to validate and generate early volume, while building your own store as the place repeat customers come back to. If you already sell through Instagram or WhatsApp, our guide to building a business website in Pakistan covers that transition in more detail.
One number should shape every decision here: the large majority of online transactions in Pakistan are initiated on a smartphone, with estimates well above 80%. Your store is a mobile product. If it is only comfortable to use on a laptop, you have built it for the smallest part of your market.
In practice that means: a page that loads quickly on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data, product photos that are legible at thumbnail size, a checkout that does not ask for information you do not need, and a phone number or WhatsApp link that is easy to find. Many buyers will want to talk to a human before their first order, especially if your brand is new to them.
Three routes exist to actually get the thing built. Hire a developer or agency; use a self-service platform and set it up yourself; or describe your business to an AI builder and edit the draft it produces. Published 2026 rates put a basic store at roughly PKR 80,000 and a mid-range e-commerce site with a real catalogue at PKR 125,000 and up — our breakdown of what a website costs in Pakistan has the full picture, including the running costs most quotes leave out.
If you would rather not pay a build fee at all, that is what we do: describe the business once and the AI Website Builder drafts the site and the online store together, which you then edit yourself. You can start from one of our templates if you would prefer to choose the look first.
Two facts reshape every plan made from a foreign guide. Stripe is not available to Pakistani merchants, and PayPal cannot be used to receive money in Pakistan. Whatever the international tutorials say, you will be choosing between local gateways and aggregators.
What to expect from them:
Whichever provider you choose, make sure your checkout covers mobile wallets, bank transfer and Raast, the State Bank's instant payment system, and not just cards. A large share of Pakistani buyers will not pay by card at all. A checkout a customer cannot use costs you the entire order, not 3% of it.
You will be offering COD. DHL Pakistan reported in 2026 that nearly 70% of online shoppers in the country still prefer it, and courier market reporting puts it at roughly 65% – 70% of transactions. Refusing COD outright means refusing most of the market.
But COD is not free, and the ways it costs you are not obvious:
Four things reliably reduce the damage, and none of them costs anything:
On couriers themselves: rates and terms vary by company, parcel volume and negotiated contract, so treat any published figure as indicative and confirm current terms directly. It is worth opening an e-commerce account rather than shipping as a walk-in customer — those accounts generally come with better rates, bulk booking and a dashboard showing what has been collected and what is still outstanding. Test two couriers side by side on real orders before committing your whole volume to one.
The first sale is the expensive one. Everything after it is where an online store actually becomes profitable, and this is the step new sellers skip almost universally — the order history lives in a chat app, the customer's details live in a courier's dashboard, and nobody could tell you who bought twice.
Fix that from the beginning, even with ten orders. You want one place holding who bought what, when, and how to reach them. That is all a CRM is; ours is the AI CRM, and enquiries from your site land in it rather than in a personal inbox. If you have never used one, our guide to choosing your first CRM explains what it does and when you actually need one.
From there the repeat business is straightforward: message past buyers when relevant stock arrives, follow up on abandoned enquiries, and ask satisfied customers for a review. Our marketing tools handle the sending side, and the built-in SEO tools work on the slower, cheaper channel — people finding your products in search instead of through paid ads.
A store with eight products you can photograph, price and ship well beats a catalogue of eighty you cannot. Start narrow.
Starting an online store in Pakistan in 2026 is cheap to begin and operationally demanding to run. The website is a weekend; the discipline around confirming orders, controlling returns, choosing payment methods your customers will actually use and keeping your own customer list is what decides whether the business lasts. If you want to see what an AI-built store looks like for your products before spending anything, start a free trial, take a look at our plans, or get in touch and we will talk it through.
Do I need to register a company to sell online in Pakistan?
Not to make your first sale. You can start on a marketplace or a social page and take orders informally. You will need registration once you want a proper payment gateway, because providers generally ask for business registration and tax documents before approving a merchant account. Treat registration as the step that unlocks card and wallet payments rather than the step that lets you begin.
How much does it cost to start an online store in Pakistan?
Published 2026 rates put a basic store at roughly PKR 80,000 to build and a mid-range e-commerce site with a real catalogue at PKR 125,000 and up. On top of that, budget for a domain at roughly PKR 2,850 – 4,500 a year for a .pk after the registry's August 2026 price rise, hosting, and your stock. If you build it yourself with an AI builder, the build fee is replaced by a monthly subscription — the cost guide compares the routes.
Should I sell on Daraz or build my own store?
Both, in that order. A marketplace brings you buyers who are already shopping, which is the fastest way to find out whether your product sells. Your own store is where the margin, the branding and the customer list live, because a marketplace keeps the customer relationship. Most sellers who last end up running both and pushing repeat buyers towards their own site.
Can I use Stripe or PayPal for a Pakistani online store?
No. Stripe is not available to Pakistani merchants and PayPal cannot be used to receive money in Pakistan, so the payment advice in most foreign guides does not apply. You will be choosing between local gateways and aggregators, and whichever you pick should support mobile wallets, bank transfer and Raast as well as cards.
How much of Pakistani e-commerce is cash on delivery?
Most of it. DHL Pakistan reported in 2026 that nearly 70% of online shoppers in Pakistan still prefer cash on delivery, and courier market reporting puts COD at roughly 65% – 70% of transactions. Plan your store around it: offering COD is close to mandatory, but you should also give buyers a prepaid option and a reason to use it.
What return rate should I expect on cash on delivery orders?
Industry reporting for 2026 puts the market return rate at roughly 25% – 35% of orders, which is high by international standards. Most failures are practical rather than malicious: wrong or incomplete addresses, nobody home, or a buyer without the exact cash. Confirming every order by phone or WhatsApp before dispatch is the single cheapest fix.
What does a courier charge to collect cash on delivery?
Published 2026 rate guides put COD handling at roughly PKR 100 – 200 per shipment for standard retail accounts, sometimes charged instead as 1% – 2% of the amount collected, on top of the delivery charge itself. Settlement of the collected cash typically takes days rather than hours. Rates vary by courier, volume and negotiated contract, so confirm current terms directly.
How long does it take to launch an online store?
The website is rarely what holds people up. With an AI builder the store itself can be drafted the same day. What takes time is product photography, writing descriptions, pricing, and opening a payment and courier account, so a realistic first launch is a couple of weeks with a small catalogue rather than a complete one.