Print on Demand in Pakistan: What Actually Works
Co-founder, Markaz ·
Print on demand works in Pakistan, but not the version in most tutorials. That version — Printful or Printify wired to a Shopify store selling to buyers in the US — breaks on payments long before it breaks on printing. Neither Stripe nor PayPal offers a merchant account here, so the money cannot reach you.
What does work: a local printer, designs a second buyer would also want, and orders that are prepaid or batched. Corporate and event printing fits Pakistan better than consumer one-offs, because it is paid up front.
And if the real goal is selling without buying stock, reselling catalogue products on Markaz does that with no printing partner, no sample rounds and cash on delivery at the door.
Below: how the model works, where the global playbook stalls, the cash-on-delivery trap that kills custom printing, the print methods to ask for, and the costs to price from.
What print on demand actually is
You upload a design. A printing partner holds blank stock — t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, tote bags, caps. When an order arrives, they print your design on one blank and ship it. You never buy stock and you never own a press.
Three models get confused with each other, and the difference decides what can go wrong:
- Print on demand. You own the design, not the product. Every unit is manufactured after the sale. Your risk is the print quality and the fact that a printed item has exactly one buyer.
- Dropshipping. You sell someone else's existing product and they ship it. Nothing is made for you. If you are new to the term, this guide to how dropshipping works covers the mechanics.
- Reselling. You sell catalogue stock from a marketplace at your own price. No design, no manufacturing, no minimum order.
Print on demand is the only one of the three where a returned parcel can be worthless. Hold that thought — in Pakistan it is the whole game.
Why the global playbook stalls here
The standard advice assumes you are a seller in a country where card payments and print partners both just work. Four things break when you run it from Pakistan.
Payments, not printing, are the blocker
To sell to Western customers you need a checkout that takes their cards. Stripe and PayPal are what every tutorial assumes, and neither opens merchant accounts in Pakistan. That has been true for years. Payoneer and Wise can receive money, but they are payout rails, not checkout gateways — they do not put a card form on your store.
So before you design anything, answer one question: how does a stranger's card payment end up in your bank account? If you cannot answer it, the rest of the plan does not matter.
A foreign printer shipping to a Pakistani customer
If your buyer is in Lahore and your printer is in the US or EU, the parcel travels for weeks, clears customs, and arrives with a duty bill nobody budgeted for. Our own breakdown of what you actually pay in customs and duty applies to a printed mug the same as to anything else. For domestic customers, a foreign print partner is not a real option.
Royalty marketplaces: check the payout first
Redbubble, Merch by Amazon, Teepublic and their peers take the other side of the work — they print, ship and handle the customer, and pay you a royalty. That removes the gateway problem, because you are being paid out, not collecting payments.
The catch is that each platform supports a specific list of seller countries and a specific set of payout methods, and both change. Check the current rules for Pakistan on the platform's own payout page before you spend a week on designs. A library of uploads on a platform that cannot pay you is not an asset.
Nobody is waiting for your design
The honest part. A print-on-demand store has no product advantage — the blank t-shirt is the same one your competitor uses. The only thing you own is the design and the audience that wants it. If you have neither yet, print on demand is a harder start than it looks, and other no-investment business ideas may fit better.
The cash-on-delivery trap
Pakistani buyers expect to pay the courier at the door. That expectation and custom printing pull in opposite directions, and this is the part the tutorials never cover.
Think about what happens when a cash-on-delivery parcel is refused. If it held a standard catalogue product, you take it back and sell it to the next buyer. If it held a shirt printed with a stranger's name and a date, it is a rag. You paid the blank, the printing and both courier legs for nothing.
Refusals are a normal cost of doing business on cash on delivery, not an exception. So the rule for printing in Pakistan is simple:
Design for a second buyer. A niche slogan, a city, a cricket joke, a profession, a university — anything another person in that group would also buy — survives a refusal. A name, a photo, a wedding date or a company logo does not.
Which gives you two tracks, and they have different payment rules:
- Repeatable designs — sell on cash on delivery, because a refused parcel goes back into stock.
- Truly personalised items — take payment up front, or at least an advance that covers the blank and the print. This is not harsh; it is the only way the maths works.
The versions that work in Pakistan
A local printer and a short design list
Find a printing shop in your city that will do single units, agree a per-piece rate and a turnaround, and start with five designs instead of fifty. Local means you can inspect the first run, fix the placement, and reprint the same week. It also means a domestic courier and cash on delivery.
Corporate, institutional and event orders
This is the part of the market that fits Pakistan's payment reality, and most people building a consumer store walk past it. Offices want branded shirts and mugs. Schools and universities want society and event tees. Weddings want favours. Gyms, clinics and restaurants want uniforms and caps.
These orders are batched, usually prepaid or part-advanced, and repeat on a calendar. One office order can be worth a month of one-off consumer sales, and the buyer is reachable: you can walk in with samples.
Overseas audiences, handled by the platform
If your designs are aimed at an international audience, a royalty marketplace is the sane route from Pakistan. You upload, they do everything else, and you never touch a gateway. Expect slow compounding rather than a launch — it is a volume game across many designs.
Validate with printing, then batch the winner
The most profitable use of print on demand here is as market research. Print single units until one design sells repeatedly, then get that one screen-printed in bulk, where the per-piece cost falls hard. You are using print on demand to find the winner, not to fulfil it forever. Our guide to starting an online t-shirt business walks the same path from the apparel side.
Print methods, and what to ask for by name
Ask a printer for "printing" and you get whatever they prefer. Ask by method and you control the outcome. The honest trade-offs:
| Method | Setup per design | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screen printing | High — a screen per colour | Bulk runs of one proven design, few colours | Uneconomic for single units; detailed artwork is hard |
| DTG (direct to garment) | None | Single units, photographic or many-colour art | Best on 100% cotton; colours sit softer than you expect |
| DTF (direct to film) | None | Single units on cotton and blends, bright colours | The transfer has a slight hand feel; edges can lift if pressed badly |
| Sublimation | None | Mugs, phone cases, polyester shirts, mouse pads | Only works on polyester or coated surfaces — never on cotton |
| Vinyl / HTV | Low | Text, numbers, names, simple shapes | Cracks and peels with age and hot washes; poor for gradients |
| Embroidery | Medium — digitising the file | Caps, polos, workwear, a premium finish | Not printing; fine detail and thin text do not survive |
Two practical rules from that table. Sublimation on a cotton shirt will not work, whatever you are told — if the blank is cotton, you need DTG, DTF or screen. And if a design is one colour and you are confident in it, screen printing a batch beats paying single-unit rates forever.
What it actually costs you
Rates move and vary by city, so price from your own quotes rather than anyone's blog numbers. What matters is the list of lines you must count, because missing one is how a "profitable" design loses money:
- the blank garment or item, at the quality you promised
- the print itself, per piece at single-unit rates
- packaging, and a polybag that survives a courier
- the courier leg out, plus the return leg on a refusal
- the cash-on-delivery or gateway fee on collection
- remakes for your own mistakes — wrong size, wrong placement, misprint
- dead stock: personalised items that came back
- your time on artwork, listings, replies and follow-ups
Add those, then set your price from the landed total. Our margin guide for resellers covers the arithmetic, and it is the same arithmetic here — a printed item simply has more lines in it.
One structural point worth being clear about: print on demand charges you single-unit manufacturing on every sale. A bulk-printed shirt is cheaper per piece than a printed-to-order one, always. You are paying that premium to avoid holding stock. That is a fair trade, but it means your margin is thinner than a wholesale seller's on the same shelf price, and discount-led selling will not work.
Choosing a print partner
Do this before you list anything, and in this order:
- Order one sample as a customer. Pay for it. See the packaging, the turnaround and the finish the way a buyer will.
- Wash it five times. Then look at the print. Cracking, fading and peeling show up in the wash, not in the photo.
- Write the spec down. Blank brand and weight, print method, print size in inches, placement measured from the collar, colour reference. "Make it nice" is not a spec, and the second print will not match the first.
- Agree a turnaround in days and what happens when they miss it. Your customer is counting from the order, not from your handoff.
- Ask who pays for a misprint. Settle it before the first one happens.
- Keep a second printer warm. Single-supplier businesses stop when that supplier travels, closes for Eid, or breaks a press.
If you need blanks in volume rather than a print service, sourcing them yourself is a separate decision. The Markaz China catalogue ships with no minimum order and 10–17 day delivery, which is a reasonable way to test a blank before committing to a local bulk buy.
Designs you are allowed to sell
Use someone else's intellectual property and the outcome is predictable: takedowns and a closed account on a royalty platform, and an angry brand locally. Logos, football kits, film and cartoon characters, song lyrics, photographs you found on Google — none of them are yours to print.
What is yours: your own drawings, your own typography, text you wrote, and assets you hold a commercial licence for. Keep the licence receipt.
On files, the specs that prevent reprints: vector artwork where you can, 300 DPI at the final print size otherwise, a transparent PNG for anything that is not a full rectangle, and a mockup that shows the real print size on a real blank. Designs that look sharp on a phone screen and blurry on a shirt are almost always low-resolution raster art scaled up.
If you want the no-stock part without the printing
Most people who search for print on demand want one thing: to sell without buying inventory first. Printing is one route to that, and it is the route with a design dependency, a manufacturing step and the refusal problem above.
Reselling is the other route, and the comparison is structural rather than a matter of rates:
- No design and no printing step. You pick products that already exist from the Markaz shop categories and share them.
- No minimum order. Order one unit for one customer.
- Cash on delivery across Pakistan, with 3–5 day delivery, so a buyer who will not prepay is still a buyer.
- A refusal costs you a delivery, not the product. The item was never personalised, so the next customer wants it too.
- You set your own margin on top of the catalogue price.
The honest limit: you are selling the same catalogue other resellers can see, so your edge is the audience you build and the trust you earn, not exclusivity. A design is genuinely yours; a catalogue listing is not. That is the real trade, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. For the seller-side setup, the Markaz dropshipping portal is where orders and payouts are managed, and our round-up of passive income ideas puts both models next to the other options.
Where to start this week
- Pick one audience, not one product. "Lahore university societies" is an audience; "t-shirts" is not.
- Draw three designs that a second buyer in that group would also want.
- Get single-unit quotes from two local printers, by print method.
- Order one sample of each design and wash it five times.
- Sell on cash on delivery for repeatable designs, prepaid for personalised ones.
- Pitch one office, school or gym on a batch order in the same week.
- Count every line in the cost list before you set a price.
Print on demand in Pakistan is not the automated storefront it is sold as. It is a design business with a printing supplier attached, and it rewards a narrow audience and a short design list. If that does not sound like what you wanted, the no-stock part is available on its own — start with the Markaz shop and sell what is already on the shelf.
