Sell something online in Pakistan and there’s a longer list of fees quietly taking a cut than most new sellers expect when they first do the math. Courier charges, payment gateway processing fees, marketplace commissions if you’re on Daraz, cash handling delays, packaging costs that scale with return rates, it adds up fast and rarely shows up as one clean number anywhere.
Daraz commission alone can run into a meaningful percentage depending on category, sometimes high enough to genuinely surprise sellers who priced their products around a simpler cost structure. Add courier fees that apply even on failed cash on delivery attempts, and a payment gateway or wallet processing fee of a few percent on every transaction that does go through, and the actual margin on a sale can end up noticeably thinner than the sticker price suggested when the product was first priced.
A lot of these fees aren’t hidden in the sense of being secret, they’re published somewhere in a courier’s terms or a gateway’s fee schedule, but they’re spread across enough documents that few sellers actually total them up before setting prices. The result is a business that looks profitable on paper and isn’t quite, once every small percentage gets subtracted.
Fees worth actually calculating
- Courier fees on both successful and failed deliveries, not just the successful ones
- Payment gateway or wallet processing percentage on prepaid orders
- Marketplace commission if selling through Daraz or a similar platform
To put rough numbers on it, marketplace commissions on Daraz can run anywhere from single digits up to around twenty percent depending on category, courier fees for a failed COD attempt commonly land somewhere in the two hundred to four hundred rupee range once packaging is counted, and payment gateway processing typically takes two to three percent off every prepaid transaction. None of these numbers are exact for every seller, but even rough estimates change how a product should be priced.
Ikonix Marketing Agency works through this full cost breakdown with a few ecommerce clients before finalizing pricing strategy, because setting prices without it almost always means discovering the real margin months later, usually after a slow quarter forces someone to actually look. It’s a spreadsheet exercise more than a marketing one, but it changes pricing decisions more than any campaign would.
None of these fees are avoidable individually, couriers and gateways need to charge something and marketplaces take their cut for the traffic they bring. But a seller who knows the real number behind every sale prices with intention, instead of finding out at the end of a busy month that busy didn’t mean profitable.