E-commerce Website Cost in Pakistan: Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom (2026)

Pakistani e-commerce is no longer an experiment. Between marketplace sellers graduating to their own stores, Instagram shops that outgrew DMs-and-bank-transfer, and established retailers finally going online, more owners than ever are asking the same question: what does an e-commerce website actually cost in Pakistan? The honest answer is that the platform decision determines your cost more than anything else — more than design, more than product count, more than who you hire. A Shopify store, a WooCommerce store, and a custom-built platform can all sell the same products, but they put the money in completely different places: one charges you forever, one charges you in maintenance time, and one charges you heavily upfront. This guide lays out the real 2026 numbers for all three paths, the hidden costs that only show up at scale, and a simple revenue-based framework for choosing.

The three paths, explained honestly

Every e-commerce quote you receive in Pakistan sits on one of three foundations. Each is the right answer for somebody — and each gets sold to people it is wrong for, so it is worth understanding what you are actually signing up for before you compare prices.

Path 1: Shopify — fast launch, rent forever

Shopify is the fastest way to a professional store. The platform handles hosting, security, and updates; you (or an agency) pick a theme, load products, and connect payments. A competent Pakistani agency will set up a themed Shopify store for PKR 50,000–150,000, and you can be selling within two to three weeks. The trade-offs are structural, not cosmetic. Shopify Basic costs $29/month for as long as the store exists — a real number in rupees, forever. On local payment methods, including JazzCash and Easypaisa through third-party gateways, you pay roughly 2% in fees on top of the gateway's own cut. And you are building on rented land: local payment flexibility is weaker than what you get on an open platform, deep customization of checkout and COD workflows is limited on the Basic tier, and if Shopify changes its pricing, you absorb it.

Path 2: WooCommerce — cheap start, you carry the keys

WooCommerce is open-source e-commerce on WordPress. There is no platform subscription and no platform transaction fee, which is why it dominates Pakistani small-business e-commerce: you pay the gateway its normal 2–3.5% and nothing else. Professional setup costs about the same as Shopify — PKR 50,000–150,000 for a theme-based build, PKR 120,000–300,000 for a mid-range store with custom design — but the ongoing economics are different. You own the hosting (PKR 3,000–25,000/month depending on traffic), and you own the maintenance burden: WordPress core updates, plugin updates, security patches, backups, and the occasional plugin conflict that takes the store down on a Sunday night. An unmaintained WooCommerce store degrades in a way a Shopify store cannot. Budget either your own time or a small monthly maintenance retainer — treating that number as zero is how cheap WooCommerce stores become expensive.

Path 3: Custom build — when the platform is the business

A custom e-commerce platform — your own cart, checkout, order management, and admin panel, typically built on a modern stack like Next.js — costs PKR 800,000–3,000,000+ ($3,000–12,000+) in Pakistan. That is five to twenty times the cost of a themed store, so the honest question is when it is worth it. Three situations justify it: unique flows that off-the-shelf platforms fight you on (B2B pricing tiers, custom order logic, unusual fulfilment or verification steps); scale, where platform limits and per-transaction fees start costing real money every month; and margins you need to protect, because at high volume percentage fees compound into sums that dwarf a build cost. A custom platform has no subscription and no platform fee — but it does have a maintenance relationship with a development team, so it is a commitment, not a one-time purchase.

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom: the comparison

One row in that table deserves emphasis for the Pakistani market specifically: local payments and COD. Cash on delivery still dominates Pakistani e-commerce, which means your courier integrations — TCS, Leopards, PostEx, Trax — matter more to your daily operations than any card gateway. Automatic booking, tracking sync, and COD reconciliation are where store owners actually lose hours every day. When you compare quotes, ask specifically how COD orders flow from checkout to courier to payment reconciliation; the answer tells you whether the developer has run a Pakistani store before or only read about one.

What moves the price within each path

• ■Product count and variants: 30 simple products is a data-entry task; 2,000 products with size/colour variants, per-variant stock, and per-variant pricing changes the catalogue architecture and the admin workload, and it moves every quote up.
• ■Local payment and COD courier integrations: connecting JazzCash and Easypaisa, plus automated booking and tracking with TCS, Leopards, PostEx, or Trax, is real integration work. On WooCommerce it is plugin configuration plus glue; on a custom build it is scoped development — either way, it is the part most worth paying for.
• ■Urdu or bilingual UI: a properly bilingual store — right-to-left Urdu layout, translated product content, language switching that survives checkout — adds meaningful design and build time, but it also converts customers an English-only store quietly loses.
• ■Custom commerce features: wholesale pricing tiers, B2B customer portals, quotation flows, loyalty programs, or multi-branch inventory. These are exactly the features that push a project from the themed tier toward the custom tier, because platforms handle them badly.
• ■Migrations: moving an existing store — products, customers, order history, and SEO redirects — from Daraz exports, an old OpenCart site, or spreadsheets is invisible in demos and painful in practice. If you have existing data, make sure the quote names it.

The hidden costs — and the math that flips at scale

The setup quote is the number everyone compares, but for a store that succeeds, it ends up being the smallest number involved. Three ongoing costs deserve attention before you choose a platform.

Transaction fees compound with your success

Percentage fees feel harmless at launch and become your largest software cost at scale. Run the numbers: on Shopify, doing PKR 1,000,000/month through local payment methods, the ~2% platform fee is PKR 20,000/month — annoying, not decisive. At PKR 5,000,000/month, it is PKR 100,000/month, or PKR 1,200,000/year — and that is before the gateway's own 2–3.5% cut, the subscription, and apps. Compare that to a custom build: a PKR 2,400,000 platform amortized over three years costs PKR 800,000/year, with no platform percentage on any order. In this scenario the custom build is cheaper than Shopify's fees alone by year one at that volume, and every rupee of growth widens the gap. Below roughly PKR 1–2 million/month in online revenue, the math favours renting; well above it, the math starts favouring owning. This is the single most under-discussed line in Pakistani e-commerce budgeting.

Maintenance, apps, and plugins

• ■Shopify apps: most stores end up with 3–8 paid apps (reviews, bundles, COD form tweaks, courier connectors) at $5–50/month each. The subscription line quietly doubles or triples.
• ■WooCommerce plugins: premium plugin licences renew annually, and someone must apply updates and keep backups. A modest maintenance retainer is cheaper than one recovery from a hacked, unpatched store.
• ■Custom platforms: no plugin subscriptions, but budget an ongoing arrangement with your development team for dependency updates, security patches, and small improvements — as with any software you own.
• ■Payment gateway fees: whatever you build on, local gateways take roughly 2–3.5% per transaction. This is unavoidable; the question is only whether a platform percentage stacks on top of it.

A decision framework: match the path to your revenue

Strip away the technology preferences and the decision is mostly a revenue question — what the store earns now, and what you credibly expect it to earn in two years.

1. 01Pre-revenue or testing an idea: Shopify, or the cheapest professional WooCommerce setup you can get (PKR 50,000–150,000). Your risk is that nobody buys, not that fees eat your margin. Validate first; every rupee spent on custom development before validation is premature.
2. 02Established store doing up to ~PKR 1,000,000/month: WooCommerce in the PKR 120,000–300,000 mid-range tier is usually the sweet spot — you own the store, fees stay low, and local COD courier plugins cover Pakistani operations well. Shopify remains fine if you value zero maintenance and accept the recurring cost.
3. 03Growing store doing PKR 2,000,000–5,000,000+/month: run the fee math above with your own numbers. This is the band where percentage fees, app stacks, and platform workarounds start costing more per year than a custom build amortizes to — and where custom features like wholesale tiers or your exact COD reconciliation flow start returning real money.
4. 04Unique model regardless of revenue — B2B portals, wholesale pricing, unusual fulfilment: go custom, or at minimum heavily customized WooCommerce. Forcing a platform to do what it was not designed for costs you twice: once in workarounds, again in the rebuild.

The next step after the website: a mobile app

For stores with repeat customers, the sequence that works in Pakistan is website first, app second. A well-built store validates demand and builds your customer base; an app then earns its keep through push notifications, faster reordering, and loyalty — channels a mobile site cannot match. If your custom store is built API-first (one backend serving web and app), adding the app later is an increment, not a rebuild — one of the quieter long-term arguments for the custom path. For what that step costs, see our guide to mobile app development cost in Pakistan; expect e-commerce apps to land in the medium-complexity tier.

How to read the quotes you receive

Whichever path you choose, a professional e-commerce quote in Pakistan should name the platform and why it fits your volume, list the payment and courier integrations included, state who loads the products and who pays for the theme or plugin licences, give a launch timeline with a demo milestone, and spell out ongoing costs — hosting, subscriptions, and maintenance — for the first year, not just the build. A developer who quotes you a single number with none of that is not quoting your store; they are quoting a template. And if a quote is dramatically cheaper than the ranges in this guide, the difference is almost always missing from the integrations column — the exact part that makes a Pakistani store run.