State of E-commerce in Pakistan 2026: Market Size, Buyers, and What Comes Next
By Umair Sandhu
Co-founder, Markaz ·
Pakistanis ran 111 million ecommerce transactions in FY25, up from 78 million the year before — a 42% jump in twelve months, according to the State Bank of Pakistan's Annual Payment Systems Review. If you've spent the last two years wondering whether online shopping in Pakistan was actually scaling or just trending on LinkedIn, that number is the answer.
This post is a 2026 reference guide for anyone trying to make a decision on Pakistani ecommerce — resellers picking a category, founders writing a pitch deck, brands deciding whether to launch local. We'll go through honest market size estimates (with the conflicting numbers explained), who's actually shopping, the COD-vs-wallet payment paradox, the player landscape including Daraz and the cross-border invaders, and what's coming in 2026 that you need to plan around.
How big is Pakistan's ecommerce market in 2026, really?
This is where most "state of ecommerce" articles bury the lede. Different research firms use different definitions of "ecommerce" and end up with numbers that look like they belong to different countries. Let us flag the conflict before quoting any of them.
The largest credible figure comes from Research and Markets, which puts Pakistan's B2C ecommerce market at USD 14.11 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 20.41 billion by 2029 at a 9.7% CAGR. This number includes digital travel bookings, digital media, and online services, not just retail.
The narrower number — closer to what most people picture when they say "online shopping" — comes from Statista's eCommerce outlook: USD 5.78 billion in 2025, with 10–15% YoY growth into 2026. Statista uses a tighter "B2C online retail" definition that strips out services.
Both can be true at once. If you're writing a strategy memo, pick the definition that matches your decision. If you're selling skincare on Instagram, the Statista number is the one you care about — and 5.78 billion dollars is still a sea of demand.
There's also a useful local marker: industry analysts at Deployers estimate the PKR-denominated market will cross PKR 500 billion by end-2026 at 18–22% annual growth. The gap between PKR growth and USD growth is the rupee depreciation story of the last three years.
Historical context: between 2020 and 2024, Pakistani ecommerce grew at a 22.2% CAGR. Growth is decelerating now (to that 9.7%) because the market is maturing — not because demand is falling.
Who is actually shopping online?
There are 116 million internet users in Pakistan as of early 2025, per DataReportal — about 45.7% of the population. That's already enough scale to support nearly any vertical, but the more important number for ecommerce is the device split.
Between 75% and 80% of online purchases in Pakistan happen on mobile. Over 60% of all ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, according to Tossdown's 2025 trends report. If your storefront isn't mobile-first by default, you're not in the conversation.
The other surprise: TikTok. Pakistan now has 66.9 million active TikTok users, making it the fifth-largest TikTok market in the world. TikTok Shop began soft-launching self-serve ads in Pakistan in 2025 — which means the country's largest short-form video audience just got a checkout flow attached to it. Social commerce isn't a future trend in Pakistan; it's already the present.
The payment paradox: 93% wallet, but COD still rules
Read the SBP report and you'd think Pakistan has gone fully cashless: 93% of online transactions in FY25 were wallet or account-based; only 7% were card-based. Sounds like a fintech success story.
Look at the draft e-Commerce Policy 2.0 from the Ministry of Commerce, though, and you get a different picture: cash on delivery still accounts for 60–70% of all ecommerce orders in Pakistan.
Both are true. The SBP figure only counts digitally settled orders — anything that touched a card, wallet, or bank rail. It excludes COD entirely. The Policy 2.0 number is market-wide.
What this means in practice:
- When a Pakistani customer pays online, they're overwhelmingly choosing JazzCash or EasyPaisa over cards. JazzCash processed PKR 10.7 trillion in the year to March 2025 with 40 million+ users. EasyPaisa did 2.7 billion transactions and PKR 9.5 trillion in 2024, roughly 9% of GDP, with 35 million+ users. Raast has 39.5 million registered IDs.
- But the majority of orders still arrive at someone's door and get paid for in cash. That fact dictates working capital, returns policy, and unit economics for any platform that's not subsidized.
If you're building or scaling, you need to architect for both — wallet-native checkout for the digital-comfortable buyer and a COD flow that doesn't bleed you dry through refusals and returns.
Category mix — where the money goes
Electronics is the single biggest category in Pakistani ecommerce at roughly 23% of revenue, per Statista. Fashion sits at number two. Within fashion, ready-to-wear accounts for around 30% of all fashion sales — Daraz alone did USD 926 million in fashion revenue in 2025 across the platform.
Beauty is roughly 12% and growing fast, mirroring the global Gen-Z creator economy. Home goods are rising on the back of the wallet-funded buyer doing apartment upgrades.
The interesting category to watch is what the social-commerce mix tells you about the next 18 months. EurosHub's 2025 read on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp shows: Fashion 28%, Electronics 22%, Beauty 12%. If that's where attention is going — and it is — that's where the next generation of brands will be built.
The platform landscape
Pakistan's ecommerce isn't a single platform's story. Five distinct lanes matter in 2026:
Daraz
Still the largest horizontal marketplace. USD 926 million in online revenue in 2025, with 5–10% YoY growth. The default starting point for most buyers and the safe assumption for any brand wanting national distribution.
Markaz
The leading reseller-led social-commerce marketplace. Markaz lets anyone in Pakistan run a shop on WhatsApp or Instagram using a curated catalogue of verified Pakistani suppliers and direct-from-China inventory. Resellers set their own margin, customers pay COD or JazzCash on delivery, and Markaz handles the supplier, fulfilment, and last-mile. Payouts to resellers happen via JazzCash or EasyPaisa within 48–72 hours of order completion. Inventory now spans both the local Pakistani supplier base and a curated China sourcing surface with all-inclusive landed-cost pricing — making it the closest thing Pakistan has to an end-to-end ecommerce stack for small operators. Browse the catalogue here.
Temu
Live in Pakistan since 2025 at temu.com/pk-en, with localized PKR pricing and JazzCash + EasyPaisa support. Currently the cross-border darling for sub-PKR-2000 fashion and beauty. Also currently under formal review by the Competition Commission of Pakistan after a complaint from the Pakistan Retail Business Council. PTA has been asked to consider a block. No ban as of mid-2026, but the regulatory overhang is real and resellers building atop Temu are exposed.
Shein
No localized PK domain. Pakistani shoppers reach Shein through the global site (geo-restricted in places) or via third-party reshippers and resellers like Negative Apparel. Same CCP/PTA review applies. Without a first-party PK flow, Shein remains a long-tail player here.
TikTok Shop
The wild card. Self-serve ads went live in 2025. If TikTok Shop turns on full checkout in Pakistan in 2026, the social-commerce vertical doubles overnight. Worth tracking even if you don't have a TikTok strategy yet — your competition will.
What changes in 2026: policy, payments, and the cross-border crackdown
Three forces are reshaping the market this year. None of them are optional to understand.
e-Commerce Policy 2.0 (2025–2030)
The Ministry of Commerce drafted Policy 2.0 in June 2025. It proposes phased COD caps, mandated digital-payment targets, and a 400% upward revision of SBP digital-transaction goals. If COD caps come into force, every platform without prepaid maturity will need to rebuild its unit economics.
The FY25–26 budget tax bomb
The Finance Act 2025 introduced a 0.25–2% final withholding tax on all digitally-ordered goods — collected by payment intermediaries on prepaid orders and by couriers on COD orders. Per TaxationPK, this is the first time the tax base treated digital and COD ecommerce the same way. The implication: low-margin reseller categories just got squeezed by 0.25–2 percentage points. Those who absorbed it took the hit; those who passed it on lost competitiveness.
The cross-border crackdown
In June 2025, the duty-free parcel threshold was slashed dramatically — from PKR 5,000 to PKR 500 per parcel, according to Arab News Pakistan. An 18% sales tax now applies to courier-delivered goods from foreign platforms. By July 7, 2025, AliExpress sellers had blocked Pakistan addresses entirely on Standard Shipping and Cainiao routes. Temu prices on Pakistan listings jumped 200–300% almost overnight, per Paradigm Shift. The 5% income tax on digital retailers was later waived for foreign platforms effective July 1, 2025 — but the duty and sales tax remain.
Net effect: Pakistan-localized platforms (with PK-side inventory, PKR pricing, and tax-inclusive landed cost) just got an enormous structural advantage over pure cross-border players. The decision matrix for resellers and brand-builders has shifted heavily toward platforms that own the Pakistan logistics layer.
Three numbers to remember from this guide
- 111 million ecommerce transactions in FY25, up 42% YoY — the demand wave is real and accelerating. SBP
- 93% of paid online orders are wallet-based, but COD still rules 60–70% of all orders — design for both. Policy 2.0
- 66.9 million TikTok users — Pakistan's TikTok Shop opportunity is global-scale. WeProms
What this means if you're starting or scaling
If you're a reseller deciding what to sell: Electronics and fashion still anchor the GMV pool, but beauty and home are where new operators are finding margin without the brand-loyal customer base of established players.
If you're a brand evaluating Pakistan as a market: the 2026 policy and tax stack now actively rewards local-side fulfilment over cross-border. A platform like Markaz that handles supplier, fulfilment, COD, and reseller payout in one stack is doing what would have cost three teams to build five years ago.
If you're a buyer trying to figure out where to spend safely: the regulatory crackdown on cross-border is good news. The platforms that survive the next twelve months will be the ones whose unit economics work without 200% tax-free runway from China.
Markaz is one of those platforms. If you're a reseller, the Pakistan catalogue is your fastest path to launch. If you're sourcing at scale, the China surface wraps the cross-border journey into one PKR-priced, tax-inclusive order. Start reselling here if you want to ride the wave.
