Your First 30 Days Selling Online in Pakistan

Week 1: Pick one product and actually cost it out

Most people spend their first week choosing a name and a logo. Skip that. Your first week goes into one decision: what are you selling, and does the math work?

Pick a single product to start. Not a category, not a "brand", one product. It is much easier to learn how selling online works when you only have one thing to photograph, describe, price, pack and ship. You can add more in month two.

Then sit down with a notebook and write out what one unit really costs you by the time it reaches a customer's hand:

• What you pay your supplier per piece

• Packaging (box or flyer bag, tape, filler, a printed slip)

• Courier charge for a 1 kg parcel, which sits somewhere around Rs 230 to Rs 330 intercity depending on the courier and your account

• The COD service fee, usually another Rs 100 to Rs 200 per shipment

• Your own time and petrol getting parcels to the drop off point

Add it up. If the number you can realistically charge is not comfortably above that total, the product is not the problem, the margin is. Better to find out now than after you have printed 500 boxes.

Week 2: Build the store in a day, not a month

This is where a lot of new sellers stall out. They spend six weeks picking a theme, changing fonts, adding a fifth banner, and never open. Nobody has ever bought a product because the homepage animation was smooth.

What you actually need before you can take an order:

• Product photos on a plain background, shot on a phone near a window. Five or six angles.

• A product description that answers the questions people will otherwise send you on WhatsApp: size, material, wash care, what is in the box

• A price

• Checkout that accepts COD, plus JazzCash or Easypaisa and bank transfer for the customers who prefer to pay upfront

• A shipping and returns page in plain language

• Your WhatsApp number, visible

That is the whole list. On Forma that is an afternoon of work, because payments, COD and the checkout flow are already set up for Pakistan and you are not stitching together three plugins to accept an Easypaisa payment.

Week 3: Sort out delivery before you need it

Delivery is where new stores lose money quietly. Open an account with a courier in week three, before orders start coming in, because getting a business account approved and getting decent rates takes a few days and a couple of phone calls.

Talk to two or three. TCS, Leopards, M&P, PostEx, Trax and BlueEx all serve online sellers and their rates move around, so ask each one for a current sheet rather than trusting a number you read somewhere. Volume gets you a better rate, so tell them honestly what you expect to ship and renegotiate once you are doing real numbers.

Ask three questions that people forget to ask:

1. How long until COD money actually lands in my account? A week is normal. Two weeks will hurt your cash flow.

2. What happens to a returned parcel, and what do you charge me for it?

3. Which cities do you cover directly and which go through a third party?

While you are at it, buy packaging in a small quantity. Fifty flyer bags, not five hundred. Your product will change.

Week 4: Get the first orders and let things break

Now you sell. Post the product on your own Instagram. Send it to friends and family, and ask them to send it to two people each. Join the Facebook groups where your kind of buyer already hangs out and be useful there instead of spamming a link.

Your first ten orders are not about profit. They are a test of your system. You will find out that your flyer bags are too small, that one courier keeps marking parcels as "customer not available" without calling, that people ask the same three questions about sizing, and that two out of ten buyers stop replying when you call to confirm.

Fix those things now while ten orders is a manageable mess. At a hundred orders it is not.

What the first month actually costs

Roughly, for a small store starting from zero:

• Initial stock: whatever you can afford to lose, which for most people is Rs 20,000 to Rs 60,000

• Store platform: Rs 3,000 a month on Forma, with no per sale commission

• Domain: around Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 a year

• Packaging: Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 for a starter batch

• Ads: optional in month one. Zero is a perfectly good number here.

You can start under Rs 50,000 if you are careful and buy stock in small lots. People who spend Rs 300,000 in month one usually spend most of it on inventory that does not sell.

The three mistakes that cost the most

Buying too much stock too early. You do not know what sells yet. Buy ten pieces, sell ten pieces, then buy fifty.

Ignoring returns until they happen. Around one in five COD parcels in Pakistan comes back undelivered. Price for it, confirm orders on WhatsApp or by call before shipping, and give a small discount to anyone who pays in advance.

Treating your store like a side thought while you live on Instagram. Instagram is rented ground. The account can go down, reach can drop overnight, and you cannot see who bought what. Your store is the thing you own. Send people there.

Start smaller than you think you should

The stores that survive their first year are almost never the ones with the best launch. They are the ones that shipped something imperfect in month one, learned what their customers actually complain about, and were still around in month six to act on it.

One product. A working checkout. A courier who picks up. That is enough to begin.