Starting an online shop from home in Pakistan

Pick one thing and be findable for it

The most common mistake is listing a bit of everything. A shop with twenty kurtas is easier to find, easier to trust and easier to restock than a shop with one kurta, one lamp and one pair of shoes.

Choose the category you know best — clothing you can judge, crafts you make, or goods you can source repeatedly — and go deep enough that a buyer who liked one item finds three more.

What it costs to start

Listing on ThriftStore.pk is free, so the real costs are your stock, your packaging and your time. If you are selling what you already own, the starting cost is close to nothing.

If you are buying stock to resell, start far smaller than feels worthwhile. Buy ten pieces, photograph and list them properly, and see what sells before you buy a hundred. Unsold stock is how most home businesses quietly end.

Set up the boring parts once

A phone number you will actually answer, a pickup address the courier can find, a corner with decent daylight for photos, and a supply of flyers and plastic bags. That is the whole setup.

Fill in the shop profile properly — the name, the city, a line about what you sell. Buyers deciding whether to trust a cash-on-delivery order look at that page, and an empty one loses sales you never hear about.

• A phone number you answer during the day
• A findable pickup address for the courier
• A window or doorway with good daylight for photos
• Flyers, plastic bags and a marker
• A completed shop profile with your city and a description

Handling orders without losing money

Confirm the order by phone, dispatch the same day where you can, and tell the buyer when it has gone. Most negative reviews are about silence, not about the item.

Keep a simple record of what each item cost you, what it sold for and what delivery took out. Sellers who track this find out quickly which category is actually earning and which one only looks busy.

Getting past the first month

Early on, your listings compete against sellers with reviews. Three things close that gap: more listings, faster replies, and asking satisfied buyers to leave a review.

Share your shop link where you already have an audience — WhatsApp status, Instagram, family groups — and keep listing. Ten good listings a week beats one perfect one.

When it grows

Once orders are steady, the constraints change: storage, photography time and packing become the bottleneck rather than demand. That is the point to batch — photograph twenty items in one session, pack in one run a day, and set fixed hours for replies.

It is also the point to think about what you are actually building: a resale shop that depends on your sourcing, or a brand that people come back to by name.