How to sell online in Pakistan

You already have people messaging you about the suit in the third photo. What you don't have is a way for them to see every price without asking, pay without a phone call, and get the parcel without you personally chasing a rider.

Four things fix that, and none of them is a website.

A page with prices, sizes and stock. A number people can send money to on a rail they already use. A courier who will collect from your door. And one rule about advance payment that you decide now, in writing, instead of per order at midnight. Raast, the State Bank of Pakistan's instant payment system, moves money person to person in seconds at zero cost to either side, using a mobile number as a Raast ID rather than a full IBAN. That is genuinely free. No processor will ever beat it, and your buyers already have it in their banking app.

The part that will cost you is cash on delivery, and specifically the parcels that come back. On a Rs 4,200 item carrying Rs 1,300 of margin, one refusal in five wipes out roughly a tenth of everything you earned that week, and you pay the freight twice for the privilege. That's where this article spends most of its time, because that's where sellers actually lose money.

What your buyers will reach for

Four rails, in rough order of how often a small seller sees them.

Cash on delivery. The default expectation. The rider knocks, the buyer pays cash, the courier remits to you on a cycle. Most first orders from a new buyer are COD unless you give them a reason not to.

Bank transfer. Either through Raast, which is instant and free, or an ordinary IBFT to your IBAN. Buyers who've bought from you before will happily do this.

Wallets. JazzCash and Easypaisa. Enormous, especially outside the big cities and among buyers who don't have a full bank account.

Card. A small minority, and mostly on large platforms rather than small shops.

Now the honest bit, up front, because it changes what you plan.

Sailo's complete list of payment rails is card, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer and cash on delivery. There is no JazzCash rail and no Easypaisa rail. What sellers do is put their JazzCash or Easypaisa number into the bank transfer instructions field, which is free text, alongside their IBAN and their Raast ID, and then confirm the payment themselves from their own app or the SMS. That works fine. It is a workaround you should understand as one. Sailo holds the catalogue and the order. Your phone holds the money.

And on cards: Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe and only Stripe. Pakistan does not appear on Stripe's own global availability page at all, read in August 2026. So the card button is not going to appear for a Pakistani seller regardless of volume, and upgrading to the Business plan at $49 a month would buy you unlimited products and coupons, not a card checkout. Build on COD and transfer, which is what your buyers wanted anyway.

Cash on delivery, and the number that decides your year

COD converts because it removes the buyer's only real fear, which is paying a stranger and receiving nothing. It shifts that risk entirely onto you and then bills you three separate times.

The bill	How it lands
Refused parcels	Freight out, freight back, and an item that comes home creased or opened
The remittance cycle	Your money sits with the courier for days after delivery, so your working capital is in a van
Handling	A fee or percentage on the collected amount, taken before you see it

The refusals are the one that decides whether you're profitable. The clearest published figures on return-to-origin come from India rather than Pakistan. GoKwik, an Indian checkout company, reports COD orders running near a 26% return-to-origin rate against under 2% on prepaid, with the industry average around 20 to 25% and fashion touching 40% (their figures, read August 2026). Pakistani couriers don't publish an equivalent number, so don't adopt that one. Adopt the shape, then ask TCS or Leopards or PostEx or whoever collects from you what your own RTO percentage was last quarter. They have it. Almost nobody asks for it.

Then do the arithmetic that makes it real. If you sell a Rs 4,200 item with Rs 1,300 of margin, and one order in five comes back costing you Rs 500 of freight both ways, five orders earn you Rs 5,200 of margin on four sales minus Rs 500 on the fifth, and you've lost nearly 10% of your margin to parcels that went nowhere. At one in four, with a heavier item, it's worse than that.

The wider view of why buyers behave this way, and what actually shifts it, is in why cash on delivery is popular in some markets and not others. It's not about people lacking cards.

The advance that stops most of it

Three rules, and the third one is the one sellers get wrong.

Confirm before dispatch. One message, with the item, the size, the full address, and the total including delivery written out. Wait for a reply. An order nobody has re-read is an order somebody will refuse.

Cap COD by distance and value. Your own city, any value you're comfortable with. Another city, a limit. A Rs 12,000 order to a new buyer four hundred kilometres away is not a sale, it's a loan you're funding.

Ask for the advance in the same message as the size confirmation, not after. This is the practitioner detail. Once a buyer has said "COD theek hai" twice and you then ask for money, it reads as distrust and half of them go quiet. Fold it into the confirmation instead: "Medium, brown, delivery to Model Town, total Rs 4,600. For out-of-city orders I take Rs 500 in advance and the rest on delivery. Raast to 03XX-XXXXXXX." Nobody argues with a policy that arrived with the details.

The advance isn't really about the money. Rs 500 doesn't cover your freight. It's a filter, and it works because the people who were never going to accept the parcel don't send it.

Worked example: Ayesha, unstitched lawn, Lahore

Ayesha sells unstitched three-piece lawn suits from Lahore. Rs 4,200 a suit, Rs 11,500 for a set of three, around 70 orders a month, mostly Instagram with a Facebook page that does well in season.

Her setup:

• One bio link to a page with every design, the fabric detail, the colour options, and a line at the top: "Ready to ship. Lahore delivery Rs 200, other cities Rs 350, 2 to 4 working days."
• Payment: Raast and IBFT as the default, with her Raast ID, IBAN and account name written on the page and "apna order number reference mein likhein" in the instructions. Her Easypaisa number is in the same box.
• COD: Lahore only, any value. Out of Lahore, Rs 500 advance and the balance on delivery.
• Courier: one main courier with door collection, one backup for the weeks the main one is slow.

Her month is roughly Rs 295,000 of goods. Her payment cost is zero, because on Raast and COD nothing is being processed. Her real cost is about twelve minutes a day matching credits to orders and about two hours a month reconciling the courier's COD remittance against her own dispatch list.

The mistake she made in her first Eid season: she took 140 orders in ten days without capping COD, shipped everything, and had 31 come back. Freight both ways on 31 parcels, four suits that came home with the packet opened and one with a mark on it, and the courier's remittance for the successful orders arrived after she'd already paid her fabric supplier. She now caps COD at Lahore and takes the Rs 500 advance everywhere else. Refusals dropped to around one order in fourteen.

Sizing, and the returns you cause yourself

For clothing this is half your refusal rate and it has nothing to do with payment.

Publish measurements as numbers. Shirt length, kameez length, shalwar length, chest, in inches, per size. Not "medium". Medium is an opinion. A buyer who reads 42 inches and orders anyway has no argument later, and more importantly, a buyer who reads 42 inches and doesn't order has saved you a return you'd have paid for twice.

Photograph the actual fabric in daylight. Colour disputes are the second most common reason a parcel gets refused at the door, and phone screens lie about colour in both directions. If a colour photographs badly, say so on the page.

If you're setting up variants for the first time, how to handle sizes and variants covers how to structure them so buyers pick the right one without messaging you.

The chat is where the sale happens

Instagram is the shopfront, WhatsApp is the counter. That pattern holds across most of Pakistani small-seller commerce and you should not fight it.

What you can do is stop typing the same eleven answers. Prices, sizes, delivery charges, delivery days, what's in stock, what's on order, how you take payment. All of it on one page a buyer can read on a phone on a patchy connection. Then your DM time goes on the questions that need you, which are the ones that actually close.

Speed of first reply matters more here than most sellers believe. A buyer who asks at 9pm and hears back at 11am has usually bought something else. If you can't reply fast, at least make sure the page answers the question they were going to ask.

The mechanics of not losing orders inside a WhatsApp thread are in how to take orders on WhatsApp.

Looking like a shop that will still exist next month

Pakistani buyers have been burned and they check. The signals that work are unglamorous.

• An account name or Raast ID that matches the shop they think they're paying. A mismatch stops transfers halfway more than anything else.
• Photos of the actual item in your own hand or on your own table. Catalogue images from a supplier get reverse-searched.
• Screenshots of previous buyers confirming delivery. Slightly ugly, and effective.
• Delivery charges and days written down, not negotiated per order.
• A price answered with a number, immediately, even if the number is a range.

The honest limits

No wallet rail. No JazzCash, no Easypaisa, no integration with either. Putting the number in the bank transfer instructions is a workaround, and a good one, but you are the confirmation step.

No card button in Pakistan. Stripe's global availability page didn't list Pakistan at all in August 2026, and Sailo's card rail is Stripe-only. That isn't a plan limitation you can pay your way out of.

Sailo can't tell you a payment arrived. The order sits at pending until you mark it paid. There's no bank feed and there isn't going to be one, because on manual rails Sailo never touches the money and takes no commission on it.

The free plan is $0 and caps at 10 products, which for a lawn seller with eleven designs in four colourways is a wall you'll hit in the first week. Pro at $19 a month takes it to 250.

What to do next

Message your courier tomorrow morning and ask for your return-to-origin percentage for the last three months. Whatever comes back is the number your COD policy should be built on. If they can't tell you, that's information too.

Then write two sentences and put them on your page. One is your COD rule, with the city limit and the advance, in Urdu if that's what your buyers read. The other is your delivery charge and days, as real numbers.

Then take the last fifteen DMs where someone asked something and didn't buy, and answer every single one of those questions on the page instead. If you want the wider comparison of what every payment rail costs and what it leaves you to do afterwards, how to take payment as a small seller has it laid out side by side.