How much does it cost to build an online store in Pakistan?

An online store has more moving parts than a business website, and each one carries its own cost. There is the platform: Shopify bills a monthly subscription in dollars on an international card, while WooCommerce is free software that needs paid hosting and someone to keep it updated. There is the payment side: a Pakistani gateway usually deducts a percentage from each card or wallet payment and may have setup paperwork, while cash on delivery has no gateway fee but carries the cost of returned parcels. And there are paid apps or plugins for things like reviews, courier booking or size charts.

The labour is driven mostly by the catalogue. Fifteen products with one size each is a short job; three hundred clothing items in five sizes and four colours, each needing photos cropped and descriptions written, is a different project entirely. Custom features also add up quickly, for example made-to-order furniture with fabric choices, a wholesale price for registered resellers, or a bundle builder for gift hampers at Eid. Ask any developer in Lahore, Karachi or the twin cities to separate setup, product upload and custom features in their quote so you can see where the money goes.

Here is a purely hypothetical way to think about it. Say a seller in Rawalpindi gets most orders through Instagram DMs and loses a few each week to slow replies. If a store converts even part of that traffic into orders placed without a chat, the monthly running cost is weighed against those recovered sales rather than against nothing. With us, a small store with a short product list is covered by the Business bundle, whose price is shown on this page, and larger catalogues or custom ordering features are quoted after the free audit.