Online Shopping in Pakistan: The Complete Guide to Daraz, JazzCash, Raast and Safe Cash on Delivery

Assalam-o-Alaikum, my dear readers. How are you all? I hope you are well, your family is well, and your chai is still hot while you read this.

Last week the light went out at seven in the evening, right when I needed to charge my phone. My old charger had died that morning — the wire was hanging by one thin thread, the way chargers always die in our homes — and the shops in the bazaar were already closed. So I sat in the dark, with ten percent battery, and ordered a new charger on my phone. It arrived the next day, I paid cash to the rider at my gate, and the whole thing cost me less than the rickshaw fare to the market would have. That small moment is the whole story of this article. Online shopping in Pakistan is no longer a big-city hobby. It is how ordinary people in Lahore, Multan, Sukkur, and small towns now buy chargers, lawn suits, shoes, and even groceries. Today I will explain it all in very simple words: where to shop, how to pay, what cash on delivery really means, and how to stay safe from scams.

Here is the short answer first. Online shopping in Pakistan is big, and it is growing every year. In 2025, Pakistanis spent about US$5,776 million — that is more than Rs1.6 trillion — buying things online, according to ECDB, a research group that tracks online shopping around the world. Some other reports put the number even higher, above US$10 billion, because they count the full value of everything sold, not just the shop’s own sales. The exact number changes with the counting method, but the direction is the same: more Pakistanis shop online every year. More than 140 million of us now use the internet, and most of the shopping happens on mobile phones — over 70 percent of the visits to online shops come from phones, and more than 80 percent of the orders are placed on a phone too. Daraz is the biggest online shopping site in the country. And the biggest change is not the shopping itself. It is the paying. Ten years ago, paying online felt scary. Today, JazzCash, Easypaisa, and the State Bank’s own Raast system move money in seconds, often for free.

How Big Is Online Shopping in Pakistan, Really?

Let me give you the numbers in plain words, because the numbers tell the story better than I can. The online shopping market grows by about 10 to 15 percent every year. In October 2026 alone, Pakistanis spent about US$509 million online in a single month. The biggest thing people buy online is electronics — mobile phones, chargers, earphones, laptops — about 23 percent of all online spending. After that come clothes and fashion, and then groceries and daily-use items. That order makes sense if you think about it. A phone is the same in every shop, so why walk to Hafeez Centre in Lahore or Saddar in Karachi when the same phone can come to your door, sometimes cheaper?

But here is the honest part, and I always give you the honest part. Online shopping is still a small slice of all the shopping in Pakistan. Most of what we buy — sabzi from the thela wala, doodh from the milkman, kapra from the bazaar — is still bought with cash, face to face. Online shopping is growing fast, but it is growing from a small base. The young people are driving it. Pakistan has one of the youngest populations in the world, and the young shop on their phones the way our parents shopped in Anarkali. That is why this matters even if you have never ordered anything online yet. The change is coming to your street, not just to Defence and Gulberg.

Where Do Pakistanis Actually Shop?

Daraz is the name everyone knows. It is Pakistan’s biggest online shopping site, owned by the same group as Alibaba, and it works like a giant digital bazaar: thousands of sellers list their products in one place, and you buy from the one with the best price and the best reviews. During the big sales — 11.11 in November, Eid sales, Ramazan deals — Daraz’s app slows down because so many people open it at once. That tells you how many of us shop there.

But Daraz is not the whole story. Many Pakistani brands now sell directly from their own websites and apps. If you search for “Junaid Jamshed online shopping Pakistan” — and many people do, it is one of the fastest-rising searches in the country — you will find the brand’s own store. The same is true for Khaadi, Sapphire, Gul Ahmed, and dozens of other names. Then there is the shopping that happens without any proper shop at all: on Facebook pages, Instagram shops, and TikTok videos. A woman in Sialkot stitches lawn suits at home and sells them through WhatsApp. A boy in Rawalpindi sells imported watches through TikTok live videos. This is called social commerce, and it is a huge part of shopping in Pakistan, even though nobody counts it properly. And groceries are moving online too — people in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad now order atta, ghee, and daal on apps and get them the same day.

So when people ask me, “Which is the best online shopping site in Pakistan?” — the question that is rising fastest on Google right now — my answer is simple. There is no single best site for everything. Daraz is best for choice and price comparison. Brand stores are best when you want the real thing, not a copy. And small Instagram shops are best for unique, handmade things — but only if you check the seller carefully first. I will come to the safety part in a little while, and it matters more than anything else in this article.

How Do We Pay? This Is Where Everything Changed

Now we come to the part that most people get wrong. Everyone talks about the shopping. Almost nobody talks about the paying. But the paying is where Pakistan changed the most.

First, cash on delivery. COD. This is still the king. Depending on which study you read, between 55 and 75 percent of online orders in Pakistan are still paid in cash when the parcel arrives at your door. Why? Because people do not trust a stranger on the internet with their money, and honestly, they have good reason. If the parcel never comes, or the wrong thing comes, the cash is still in your hand. So the rider brings the parcel, you give him the money, and everyone is happy. COD is simple, and it works for people who have no bank card at all — which is still most of Pakistan.

But COD has real problems too, and sellers feel them every day. Up to 30 percent of COD parcels are refused or returned, because the buyer changed their mind, or was not at home, or never really wanted the thing. The seller pays the courier for the trip both ways and gets nothing. And the government now charges more tax on cash orders than on digital payments: under the tax rules, the withholding tax is 2 percent on a cash-on-delivery order but only 1 percent when you pay online, for a filer. For a non-filer, it is 4 percent against 2 percent. So every time you pay cash, you quietly pay more tax than your neighbour who paid with a wallet.

That is why the wallets grew so fast. JazzCash is now the biggest mobile wallet in the country, with 60 million registered customers — and nearly 30 million of them used it actively in the first three months of 2026. In the year to March 2026, people moved Rs16.8 trillion through JazzCash. That is a number so big it is hard to imagine: sixteen thousand eight hundred billion rupees, through one app. JazzCash also gives small loans — about 202,000 loans every day — and since June 2026, you can even buy government Treasury Bills from the app, starting from just Rs5,000. Easypaisa is the older one — it started in 2009, the first mobile wallet in Pakistan — and it has now become something bigger: the State Bank gave it Pakistan’s first Digital Retail Bank licence, which means it can work like a real bank, with deposits and loans, but fully on your phone. Easypaisa has 59 million registered users, about 20 million use it every month, and it gives around 65,000 small loans every day.

Raast: The Quiet Revolution Nobody Talks About

If JazzCash and Easypaisa are the shops, Raast is the road underneath them. Raast is the State Bank of Pakistan’s own instant payment system. It started in January 2021 for bulk payments — salaries and government payments — and the person-to-person part came in February 2022. The idea is very simple. You send money using only the other person’s mobile number. The money reaches their account in seconds. And the State Bank’s rule is that it is free for customers.

The numbers are honestly hard to believe. In just three months — January to March 2026 — Raast processed 742 million transactions worth Rs23.27 trillion. Person-to-person payments alone were 664 million transactions worth Rs18.88 trillion. Almost 50 million people have linked their mobile number as a Raast ID, and 2.6 million merchants have registered. When you scan a QR code at a kiryana shop in Faisalabad or a dhaba on the Motorway and pay from your phone, that is often Raast working quietly in the background. More than 1.7 million merchants now take Raast QR payments, and the State Bank says digital channels now carry 92 percent of all retail payment transactions in the country — up from 88 percent just a year ago. In the last financial year, 13.2 billion digital transactions happened in Pakistan, up 65 percent in one year. Most of them — more than 11 billion — were made on mobile phones.

And here is the part that makes me smile. The Benazir Income Support Programme — BISP, the money that goes to the poorest women in Pakistan — has now opened 10 million mobile wallet accounts for women who never had a bank account before in their lives. HBL opened 3.1 million of them, Bank Alfalah 3 million, Bank of Punjab 2 million, JazzCash 1.2 million, and Easypaisa nearly 700,000. The goal is that by June 2026, every BISP payment should reach women digitally. Think about that for a second. A woman in a village in Tharparkar who never held a bank card now gets her money on a phone. That is what digital payments really mean. It is not about fancy apps. It is about people who were outside the system finally being inside it.

One small note, because I do not want to confuse anyone: crypto coins like Bitcoin are a completely different thing from JazzCash and Raast, and the rules for them in Pakistan are strict and very different. If you are curious about that, I wrote a simple guide to Bitcoin in Pakistan and the PVARA rules. Keep your daily shopping money in wallets and banks, and treat crypto as a separate subject with its own rules.

Cash on Delivery: The Honest Picture

I promised you my own story, so here it is. Last year I ordered a kurti online for a family dawat. The picture was beautiful — soft green, neat embroidery, exactly what I wanted. The parcel came in three days. I paid cash to the rider, opened the box, and the kurti inside was a different green, the embroidery was rough, and the size was wrong. I had paid already. The rider was polite and waited while I checked, but there was nothing he could do — the money was already in his hand, and the shop’s return policy said I had to courier it back myself and wait two weeks.

I am not telling you this to scare you. I am telling you because this is the real experience of online shopping in Pakistan, and the honest picture has two sides. COD protects you from the biggest fear — paying a thief and getting nothing. But once you hand over the cash, getting it back is slow and hard. A prepaid order from a trusted shop, paid through JazzCash or a card, often has a cleaner refund, because the payment is on record and the shop cannot pretend you never paid. So my rule now is simple. First order from a new shop: always cash on delivery. Second order, from a shop that treated me well: I pay online, because it is cheaper, faster, and the record protects me.

How to Shop Safely Online — My Own Rules

These are not rules from a book. These are the rules I actually use, and I am sharing them the way I would share them with my younger sister.

First, never pay in advance to a random number on WhatsApp or Facebook. If a seller says “send Rs2,000 advance on JazzCash and I will dispatch your parcel,” and they have no proper shop, no reviews, and no return policy — do not send it. Real shops take COD for the first order. Second, always check the seller’s rating and read the reviews, especially the ones with photos. A shop with a thousand happy reviews is not perfect, but it is a thousand times safer than a shop with no reviews at all. Third, open the parcel before you pay, if the rider allows it. Many couriers now allow parcel checking, and a good seller will not mind. Fourth, take screenshots of everything — the product page, the price, the seller’s promise, your payment. If something goes wrong, those screenshots are your proof. And fifth, if a deal looks too good to be true, it is not true. An iPhone for Rs15,000 is not a bargain. It is a trap. I know this sounds like common sense, but every week someone in Pakistan loses money to exactly this trap.

One more thing, and this one is for the aunties and uncles reading this: teach your children these rules too. The scams now come through TikTok and Instagram, with pretty videos and fake comments, and they target young people who have never been cheated before. A five-minute talk at home saves a lot of tears later.

Want to Sell Online? Start Here

Maybe you are not here to buy. Maybe you are here to sell. Good — because that is the other half of this story, and it is where the real money is for young Pakistanis.

The easiest way to start is Daraz. There is no fee to list your product. Daraz takes a commission when you sell — from 2 percent on laptops to 20 percent on jewellery and watches, depending on the category — plus a payment fee of 2.25 percent and a small handling fee of Rs10 to Rs60 per item. New sellers pay zero commission for their first 30 days. You need a CNIC and a tax number (NTN), and you must remember the tax I mentioned: 1 percent withholding on digital payments, 2 percent on cash on delivery, for filers. Price your product after counting all of this, not before. I have seen too many new sellers celebrate a sale and then cry when they see the payout.

The other way is your own shop — a Shopify store or a WooCommerce website — where you bring your own customers through TikTok and Instagram ads and keep more of each sale. It is harder, because nobody finds you on their own, but the customers are yours, not Daraz’s. And you will need a payment gateway to take cards and wallets — the State Bank has a list of approved payment companies, so only use one from that list. Whichever road you choose, start small. Sell ten things before you buy a hundred. And keep learning: faster internet is reaching more cities every month — you can check where 5G has reached in Pakistan in our guide — and every new tower means more customers who can shop from their phones.

What Happens Next?

So where is all this going? Three things, and you can already see them happening. First, the QR code is coming to every shop. Your kiryana wala, your sabzi wala, your barber — more than 1.7 million merchants already take Raast QR, and the number grows every month. Soon, paying with a phone will be as normal as paying with cash. Second, the government is pushing everything digital — BISP payments, government fees, utility bills — and that pulls millions more people into wallets. And third, even travel is moving online now: hotels, bus tickets, and tours are booked on phones, and if you are planning a trip, our Pakistan tourism guide explains the places and the visa rules in the same simple way.

Online shopping in Pakistan is not perfect. The parcels sometimes come wrong. The riders sometimes come late. The internet sometimes dies in the middle of a payment, and you sit there wondering whether your money went or not. But compare it with ten years ago, when ordering anything online felt like sending money into a black hole. Today the roads exist — Raast, JazzCash, Easypaisa — the shops exist, and the rules exist. The rest is up to us: shop carefully, pay wisely, and tell each other which sellers are honest and which ones are not. That is how a market becomes trustworthy — one honest review at a time.

Take care, my dear readers, and if you have ever shopped online in Pakistan — or if you are still afraid to try — please tell me in the comments or through our Contact Us page. I would love to hear which shops treated you well, which ones did not, and what questions you still have. Your questions are always welcome, and I will try my best to answer them.