Daraz vs Markaz for Resellers: Fees, COD & Margins
By Sameel Hayat
Co-founder, Markaz ·
Daraz and Markaz both let you sell online in Pakistan, but they put you in two different jobs. On Daraz you are a seller: you register a business, buy and hold your own stock, list it yourself, and pay the marketplace a category commission plus payment and fulfilment charges on every order. On Markaz you are a reseller: you pick from the catalogue, add your own margin, and place the order only after a customer has already agreed to buy — no stock, no minimum order, nothing to recover before you profit.
For most people starting with limited cash, that one difference decides it. Daraz suits someone who already owns inventory and wants reach. Markaz suits someone who wants to start earning without buying stock first. Below: how the fees actually work on each side, who carries the cash-on-delivery risk, and how the margin maths differs.
Seller or reseller: the difference that decides everything
Daraz is a marketplace. You open a seller account, upload your products, set your prices, and Daraz brings shoppers who are already searching. In exchange, you own everything upstream — sourcing the goods, paying for them, storing them, and eating whatever doesn't sell. Daraz is the shelf; the stock on it is yours.
Markaz is a reselling platform. The stock belongs to the suppliers on the platform. You browse the catalogue, pick items, set your own selling price on top of the listed price, and share them with buyers over WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. When a customer confirms, you place the order and Markaz dispatches it, collects the money and handles the return if there is one. You never own inventory, so you never carry dead stock.
Two jobs, two risk profiles. A seller's risk is capital: money tied up in boxes that may not move. A reseller's risk is effort: time spent finding buyers for products that anyone else can also list. Which risk you'd rather carry is the real question behind "Daraz or Markaz".
Fees: what each side actually charges
This is where most comparison articles go wrong by quoting a percentage. Rate cards change, and they change by category. Here is the honest version — the structure of the costs, so you know exactly what to look up before you commit.
What it costs to sell on Daraz
Opening a Daraz seller account is free, but selling on it is not. A Daraz order typically carries several separate deductions:
- Category commission — a percentage of the item price, and it differs a lot by category. Electronics, fashion and home goods are not charged alike.
- Payment / transaction fee — charged on the collected amount, whether the buyer paid by card, wallet or cash.
- Shipping and fulfilment — either you ship it yourself and absorb the courier cost, or you use Daraz's fulfilment service and pay for pick, pack and storage.
- Returns and failed deliveries — a refused parcel still costs you the outbound and often the return leg.
- Campaign discounts — joining the big sale events usually means funding part of the markdown yourself, in return for placement.
None of these are hidden; they are all in Seller Center. But they stack, and they stack after you have already spent money buying the stock. Check the current rate card for your exact category in Seller Center before you price anything — don't work off a number you read in a blog post, including this one.
What it costs to resell on Markaz
The reseller model inverts the cost structure. There is no joining fee and no listing fee, because you are not renting shelf space — you are sharing products that already exist in someone else's warehouse. Your buying price is the price shown in the app; your selling price is whatever you choose to add on top. The gap is yours.
What you do not pay for: stock, storage, packing, courier accounts, or a business registration to get started. What you do spend: your time finding buyers, and whatever you choose to put behind a boosted post. Profit from a delivered order lands in your Easypaisa or JazzCash account within 48–72 hours, so your working capital cycles quickly instead of sitting in a settlement queue.
The honest caveat: because the catalogue is open to every reseller, price is not your moat. Your customer relationships and your response time are. That is a real difference from a Daraz listing, where a good product page can earn organic search traffic for months.
Cash on delivery: who carries the risk
COD is still how most of Pakistan buys online, and it is the single biggest operational difference between the two models.
On Daraz, COD is offered to the buyer and the marketplace collects the cash, then remits it to your bank on a settlement cycle. That part is clean. The pain is the refusal rate: when a COD parcel is rejected at the door, you are the one who paid for the product and the freight. Sellers manage this with confirmation calls, tighter address checks and by watching which categories refuse most.
On Markaz, COD is built into the model and the platform collects the payment. Because you order only after the customer has confirmed, and because you never bought the stock in advance, a refused parcel does not leave you holding an item you paid for. You lose the sale and the effort, not the capital. If you want the mechanics in detail — confirmation scripts, refusal rates, which categories behave — the COD dropshipping in Pakistan guide covers it properly.
Both platforms deliver nationwide. Markaz orders sourced within Pakistan typically reach the customer in 3–5 days; items brought in factory-direct from China take 10–17 days, which you should tell the buyer up front rather than after they have paid.
Daraz is not the only COD route, either. If you are weighing app-based options rather than a marketplace, the roundup of dropshipping apps with cash on delivery in Pakistan compares what each one actually collects and remits.
Margins: where your profit comes from
The two models make money in genuinely different ways, and comparing them by "margin percentage" alone is misleading.
A Daraz seller's margin is the gap between the wholesale cost they paid and the price the customer pays, minus commission, payment fee, shipping and returns. It can be wide, especially if you source well or manufacture your own goods — but every rupee of it was funded upfront, and unsold units quietly delete the profit from the units that did sell.
A Markaz reseller's margin is whatever they add on top of the catalogue price. It is usually thinner per unit than a well-sourced seller's, and it is fully realised because nothing was pre-purchased. There is no dead stock to write off.
An illustrative margin walk-through
Made-up numbers, purely to show the shape of the arithmetic — not Markaz or Daraz prices.
As a Daraz seller: say you buy 50 units of an item at PKR 700 each. That is PKR 35,000 of your money, spent before a single sale. You list at PKR 1,500. On each sale, commission, payment fee and shipping come off the top. If 35 units sell and 15 sit in a cupboard, your real profit is the margin on 35 units minus the PKR 10,500 still locked in the unsold 15 — and minus the returns among the 35.
As a Markaz reseller: the same item is in the catalogue at PKR 700. You share it at PKR 1,500. You order 35 times, once per confirmed customer, and pay nothing for the 15 sales that never happened. Your per-order margin is the PKR 800 gap, less anything you spent on ads, and your downside on a bad product is zero rupees of stock.
The point is not that one number beats the other. It is that the seller's profit is calculated across the whole purchase, and the reseller's is calculated per order. If you want to model this for your own budget, the how much money you need to start dropshipping in Pakistan breakdown walks through the real cost lines.
Capital: the number that stops most people
Ask anyone who abandoned an online business in Pakistan why, and it is rarely marketing. It is that the first PKR 30,000–50,000 of stock went into slow-moving products and there was nothing left to try again with.
Daraz does not require you to buy stock in any formal sense — but a marketplace listing without stock behind it fails on delivery timelines, and your seller metrics suffer. In practice you need inventory, a bank account, and documentation.
Markaz has no minimum order. You can resell one unit. That is the whole difference for a first-time seller: you can test ten products in a month without buying any of them, keep the two that people actually respond to, and drop the rest at no cost. Start by browsing product categories and picking a niche you can talk about credibly, rather than listing everything.
Delivery, returns and after-sales
On Daraz you are responsible for dispatching on time, and your account health depends on it. Late shipment, cancellation and return rates are all measured, and poor numbers cost you visibility. Returns come back to you, and you decide whether the item is resellable.
On Markaz the platform handles dispatch, payment collection and returns end to end, with 7-day returns and buyer protection. You are not packing parcels or chasing couriers. The trade-off is that you also don't control the packaging or the delivery experience — you are representing someone else's fulfilment to your customer, so pick suppliers with good ratings and check the best dropshipping suppliers in Pakistan guide for how to vet one.
Reach vs control: the honest trade-off
Daraz's real asset is demand. People open the app already intending to buy, and a well-optimised listing can pull sales while you sleep. That is worth paying commission for, and it is the strongest argument for selling there.
Markaz's real asset is that it removes everything between you and your first sale — but the demand is yours to create. Nobody browses your catalogue; you bring the buyers from WhatsApp groups, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram and TikTok. If you already have an audience, or you are willing to build one, that is an advantage: you own the customer relationship and can sell to the same person again. If you have no audience and no patience for building one, Daraz's traffic is the thing you are missing.
There is a third door if you want your own storefront rather than either marketplace: Markaz products can be pushed into a Shopify or WooCommerce store, so you keep your own brand and still hold no stock. The sell on Shopify setup covers that path.
Which one fits you
Choose Daraz if: you already own or manufacture stock, you have a registered business and a bank account, you can fund inventory and wait out a settlement cycle, and you want to be found by buyers who are already searching.
Choose Markaz if: you are starting with little or no capital, you want to test products before committing money, you'd rather sell to people you can message directly, and you want delivery, COD collection and returns handled for you. The Markaz reseller program is the starting point.
Choose neither yet if: you haven't decided what you're selling. Both platforms punish scattershot listing. Pick a category, learn its buyers, then choose the model.
And if the real question is which reseller app to use rather than marketplace-versus-app, that's a different comparison: Zarya vs Markaz looks at catalogue size and payouts, and HHC vs Markaz covers order processing and supplier reliability.
Can you run both at once?
Yes, and plenty of people do — they are not mutually exclusive because they use different assets. A common pattern: resell on Markaz to find out which products your audience actually buys, then, once a product proves itself repeatedly, buy that one in bulk and list it on Daraz where the search traffic is. You are using the reseller model as a free product-testing lab and the marketplace as a scaling channel.
The reverse works too. An existing Daraz seller with a warm customer list can resell Markaz catalogue items to those same buyers on WhatsApp for categories they don't stock, without widening their inventory. If you want a lighter version of the same idea with no selling at all, the Markaz affiliate program pays on referrals instead of margins.
For a more brand-level take on why sellers move across, there's an older piece on why selling on Markaz makes more sense than selling on Daraz; this guide is the numbers-and-mechanics version of the same question.
How to start reselling on Markaz
Four steps, and none of them cost money:
- Sign up and pick one category. Ladies' fashion, mobile accessories, kitchen and home, or kids' items are the usual starting points because they move all year.
- Choose five products, not fifty. You need to be able to answer questions about every item you post. Five is manageable; fifty is a catalogue nobody trusts.
- Set your margin deliberately. Price to the market, not to cost-plus-a-little. Leave room for the occasional return, or your first refused parcel wipes out a week.
- Sell where you already are. WhatsApp status, family and neighbourhood groups, Facebook Marketplace, a short Reel showing the product in use. Reply fast — in COD selling, the quickest responder usually gets the order.
Once orders are steady, widen the range slowly and add China-sourced items for gadgets and trend products Pakistan doesn't make locally — compare landed cost rather than sticker price, and set the 10–17 day expectation with the buyer before they order.
Quick answers
Is Markaz cheaper than Daraz for a beginner?
For a beginner with no stock, yes — because the cost that matters is inventory, not commission. Markaz needs no upfront purchase and has no minimum order, while a workable Daraz operation needs stock funded before you sell anything.
Do I need a registered business to sell on either?
Daraz seller registration expects business documentation and a bank account for payouts. Markaz reselling does not — you can start as an individual and receive profit into Easypaisa or JazzCash.
Which platform pays out faster?
Markaz pays profit on a delivered order into Easypaisa or JazzCash within 48–72 hours. Daraz remits to your bank account on its own settlement schedule, which is published in Seller Center.
Who pays if a COD order is refused?
On Daraz the seller carries the cost, because they already bought the product and paid the freight. On Markaz you lose the sale but not the capital, since nothing was purchased before the customer confirmed.
Can I sell the same products on both?
You can, but treat them as different jobs. Use reselling to discover what sells with no risk, and put your own money into bulk stock on Daraz only for the products that have already proven themselves.
