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.
Is a WhatsApp catalogue enough on its own?
For a lot of sellers in Pakistan the real question is not Daraz versus your own store — it is whether you need a store at all when a WhatsApp catalogue is free, takes an afternoon to set up, and already lives where your customers are. For your first few dozen orders, the honest answer is often no, you do not. A catalogue is a perfectly good way to do step 1 above and find out whether strangers will pay your price.
What matters is knowing where it stops. These limits come from Meta's own developer documentation for WhatsApp catalogs and carts, not from vendor blog posts:
There is also no checkout. In the documented flow the order simply arrives as a message with the item details, and payment and delivery are arranged in the conversation afterwards. At five orders a day that is fine, and arguably friendlier than a form. At thirty a day it means re-typing totals, remembering who has paid, and scrolling a chat history to find an address — which is exactly the admin load that section 7 below is about avoiding.
The limit that costs you the most, though, is invisible: a catalogue has no address on the web. There is no URL for Google to index, no product page to rank, no page to put in an ad or a bio link that shows prices and delivery terms without a conversation first. Every single buyer has to already know your number. That is the practical difference between a sales channel, which you rent from a platform, and an asset you own — our guide to what a website costs in Pakistan puts real numbers on what owning one involves.
So the sensible answer for most sellers is not one or the other: keep the catalogue as the fast, familiar channel for repeat buyers and quick reorders, and build a proper online store as the place that gets found in search, states your prices once, takes the order cleanly and keeps a record of it. The catalogue sells to people who already found you. The store is how new people find you at all.
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 the choice you are stuck on is Shopify or WooCommerce, know that neither platform's own payment service is available to Pakistani merchants, which changes the usual comparison. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce guide for Pakistan works through what that means for fees, upkeep and cash-on-delivery orders.
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. (This holds whoever builds your store. When a platform advertises Stripe checkout "globally" it is describing the countries Stripe itself serves — from Pakistan you will be using its local payment options instead, so ask which ones it supports before you commit.) 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. Our separate guide to choosing a courier for your online store covers the six terms worth comparing and the questions to ask before you sign. 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.
Until recently a small online seller in Pakistan could stay informal for a long time. That is no longer true, and it is the biggest practical change to this business in years. The Finance Act 2025 created a separate tax treatment for digitally ordered goods — anything ordered through a marketplace, a website or an app — and through 2026 the FBR switched on collection at source, with payment platforms, couriers and online marketplaces acting as the collecting agents.
Three things follow from that, and all three affect how you price and how you plan cash flow.
Day to day, that means three habits. Build the deduction into your prices rather than discovering it on your first settlement. Stay on the Active Taxpayer List. And reconcile what the courier and the gateway say they withheld against your own order records every month — which is another reason to keep orders in one system you control rather than in a chat thread, as the next section covers.
One honest caveat: these rules are recent, they are amended through Finance Acts and FBR notifications, and the figures above are the position as published in 2026. This is general information, not tax advice — confirm what currently applies to your business at fbr.gov.pk or with a tax adviser before you set your prices.
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 for $1, 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?
You can test a product informally, but not much beyond that. Since the Finance Act 2025, online marketplaces and courier services are required to deal only with sellers registered with the FBR, and payment gateways ask for business registration and tax documents before approving a merchant account. Registration is now an early step rather than a later one. Confirm what applies to your business with the FBR or a tax adviser.
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.
How much tax is deducted from my online sales in Pakistan?
As published in 2026 under SRO 1429(I)/2025, a payment intermediary withholds 1% of the gross amount on orders paid through digital or banking channels, and a courier withholds 2% on cash collected on delivery. Sales tax is withheld separately at 2% of the gross value of digitally ordered goods, which is treated as the final sales tax liability for cottage industries and smaller non-Tier-1 retailers. These rules change with each Finance Act, so verify the current figures with the FBR or a tax adviser.
Is it worth being on the Active Taxpayer List as an online seller?
Yes, and measurably so. The withholding rates above apply to sellers on the Active Taxpayer List; sellers who are not on it are reported to pay double. That difference comes off every single order rather than out of your profit at the end of the year, so it is worth checking your status before you set your prices.
Do these tax rules apply if I sell from my own website?
Yes. The rules are written around "digitally ordered goods", which covers orders placed through your own website or app as well as orders placed on a marketplace. When a customer pays on your own store, the bank acquiring that payment acts as the collecting intermediary; when they pay cash on delivery, the courier does. Building your own store instead of listing on a marketplace does not put you outside the regime, so budget for the deduction from your first order.
Is a WhatsApp catalogue enough instead of a website?
For your first orders, usually yes — it is free and your buyers already have the app. It stops being enough once you need to be found. A catalogue has no web address, so nothing in it can be indexed by Google, linked in an ad or read without a conversation. Meta's documentation also confirms a business cannot send a cart to a customer and a sent cart cannot be edited, so quoting, discounting and correcting orders all happen as free text. Most sellers end up running both: the catalogue as a channel, the store as the asset.
How many products can a WhatsApp catalogue hold?
Meta's own business guide puts the catalogue at up to 500 items with up to 10 photos or videos per product. A multi-product message shows at most 30 of them at a time, and a customer's cart takes up to 99 units of any single item with no limit on how many different items it contains.
Every guide is listed on the blog.
Every guide is listed on the blog.