Instagram, WhatsApp, Daraz or your own store: where should you actually sell?
Most Pakistani sellers start on social and stay there. Here is what each channel is genuinely good at, what it costs you, what you are left holding at the end — and why the answer is almost never just one of them.
Almost every seller we talk to is running some version of the same setup: products on Instagram, orders in WhatsApp, maybe a Daraz listing, and a nagging feeling that there should be a website somewhere in this.
The honest answer is that these are not competing options. They do different jobs, and the sellers who do well usually run two or three of them at once. What matters is knowing which job each one is doing — and which of them you would still have tomorrow if something went wrong.
What each channel is actually for
| Channel | Best at | Costs you | You own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram / TikTok / Facebook | Being discovered by people who were not looking for you | Time, and ad spend if you want reach | Nothing — the account and the audience sit on their servers |
| Closing a sale and answering questions | Your evenings | The contacts, as long as you keep the number | |
| Daraz and other marketplaces | Buyers who are already shopping, today | Commission per order, plus their rules | Very little — usually not even the customer's contact details |
| Your own store | Being the place a repeat customer comes back to | A monthly fee, and you must bring the traffic | The catalogue, the customer list, the domain, the search rankings |
Read that last column again. It is the whole argument.
Social sells well and owns you
There is nothing wrong with selling on Instagram. It is where a huge share of first purchases in Pakistan begin, and for a new seller with no traffic it is the fastest start available.
The problem is what you are building on. Reach is decided by an algorithm you do not control and that changes without notice. A hacked or wrongly-flagged account can disappear overnight, and if it does, so does every product photo, every review in the comments, and every follower you spent two years collecting. Recovering a suspended business account from a support queue is not a plan.
There is also a quieter cost. Nobody has ever found a shop by searching Google and landing on an Instagram grid of unlabelled photos. Every hour you spend posting builds someone else's platform, and none of it accumulates into search traffic that keeps arriving while you sleep.
WhatsApp is a great counter and a terrible catalogue
WhatsApp is where the Pakistani sale actually closes, and it should stay that way. What it cannot do is hold your catalogue. Price lists get out of date the moment you change one, the same four questions get typed out forty times a week, and orders live in a chat thread where "did I ship that one?" is genuinely hard to answer at the end of a busy day.
The fix is not to abandon WhatsApp. It is to stop making it do the catalogue's job: send one link, let the site answer the sizing and delivery questions, and keep WhatsApp for the conversations that actually need a human.
Marketplaces buy you demand and rent you the customer
A marketplace listing puts you in front of people already trying to buy today. That is worth real money, and for clearing slow stock it is hard to beat.
What you are renting, though, is the relationship. Search results are ordered in a way that rewards the cheapest seller, so you compete on price with people who may be willing to lose money for a while. You generally do not get the buyer's contact details, which means you cannot tell them about next season. And your listing lives at the platform's discretion — a policy change or a metric slipping can cost you your placement without warning.
Used deliberately, a marketplace is an acquisition channel. Used as the whole business, it is a business you do not own.
Your own store is the only asset on the list
A store on your own link is the one channel where the work compounds. The product pages can rank in Google and keep bringing visitors for years. The customer list is yours to message. Nobody takes a percentage of the order. And when you eventually move to your own domain, everything you have built moves with it.
The catch is honest and worth stating: a store does not come with an audience. On day one, nobody is looking for it. That is exactly why the hybrid is the right answer.
The arithmetic that settles the argument
People overthink this. Take last month and do two sums:
- Marketplace: total commission and fees deducted from your payouts.
- Own store: the monthly plan fee.
For most sellers doing steady volume, the first number passes the second surprisingly early — and the store fee is flat, so every additional order after that point is cheaper on your own site than on someone else's. The store does not have to replace the marketplace to be worth it. It only has to carry the customers who already know your name.
How to run all three without doubling your work
- Social stays the shop window. Keep posting. Change nothing except the link in your bio, which now goes to your store.
- The store becomes the answer to every question. "How much?" gets a product link, not a retyped price.
- WhatsApp stays for closing. A visitor who is unsure should be one tap away from asking you directly.
- The marketplace keeps running. It is paid acquisition that you only pay for when it works.
- Put a card in every parcel with your store link and a code for the next order. Marketplace and social buyers become direct buyers one parcel at a time — and a direct repeat order costs you no commission at all.
The real objection: "will people trust a site they have not heard of?"
Not automatically — which is why the trust signals matter more here than anywhere else. Offer cash on delivery, and say so on every page. Show a real phone number and a WhatsApp button. Publish a return policy in plain language. State the delivery window honestly. Make sure the site loads over HTTPS and looks right on a phone.
None of that is exotic; all of it is the difference between an order and a closed tab. Our guide to cash on delivery covers why COD is usually non-negotiable for a new store, and what it costs you.
If you decide to open one
Start small and specific: ten products you can actually deliver, photographed the same way, with the WhatsApp questions already answered on the page. Our step-by-step launch guide covers the whole sequence, and the SEO checklist covers the part where Google starts sending you people who have never heard of you.
On LaunchLancer you can open a store on the free tier, on a subdomain, without paying anything — and there is a WhatsApp button built into the storefront, because a hesitant buyer asking a question is a sale you have not lost yet. If you want to see what a finished store looks like first, the case studies walk through complete storefronts and link to the live version of each.
Ready to put this into practice?
Start a store free — pick a theme, add your products, and share your link. Cash on delivery is built in from day one.
Start free