E-commerce importing follows the same customs rules as any other trade, but the operating model is different in ways that catch sellers out. Order quantities are small and frequent, margins are thin enough that freight choice decides profitability, and the customer expects a delivery experience that the supply chain behind it was never designed to provide. This article covers how import logistics actually works for online sellers in Pakistan.
The first decision: courier or freight
Almost every seller starts with express courier because it is simple, and almost every seller eventually outgrows it. The break point is worth understanding rather than discovering.
Express couriers price on chargeable weight and bundle transport, customs formalities and delivery into one service. That convenience is genuinely valuable at low volume. As consignments grow, the per-kilogram cost stops being competitive with air freight, and considerably before that with sea freight.
- Very small, urgent consignments and samples: courier is usually right
- Moderate volume with some time pressure: air freight, cleared properly, is generally cheaper per unit
- Regular volume with forecastable demand: sea freight, in LCL or FCL depending on quantity
- Mixed: base stock by sea, replenishment by air, samples by courier
Personal versus commercial imports
A recurring problem for new sellers is treating commercial stock as a personal import. Goods brought in for resale are commercial regardless of quantity, and the fact that a consignment is small does not make it personal. Getting this wrong creates a compliance position that is awkward to unwind once volume grows and the pattern becomes visible.
The correct approach from the outset is to import as a registered business, declare accurately and build a clean record. It costs marginally more at the start and removes an entire category of risk later.
Product compliance: the trap that closes late
Sellers routinely discover approval requirements after the stock has arrived. Radio-enabled devices need type approval before they can be sold or connected; cosmetics, supplements and food products attract health and labelling requirements; electrical goods may need to meet standards requirements.
The pattern is consistent and expensive: a product is sourced, ordered, shipped and landed, and only then does it emerge that it cannot lawfully be sold in the form it arrived. Checking the compliance position before placing the order takes an afternoon; discovering it afterwards can write off the consignment.
Consolidating from multiple suppliers
Online sellers typically buy small quantities from several suppliers in the same origin market — often the same city. Shipping those separately multiplies freight, documentation and clearance cost across consignments that could have travelled as one.
Buyer's consolidation collects them at origin into a single shipment. For a seller running twenty SKUs from six suppliers, this is frequently the single largest available saving, and it also reduces the number of clearance events to manage.
Fulfilment and the cash conversion problem
Once stock lands, e-commerce economics are dominated by two numbers: how fast it sells and how much of it comes back. Both are inventory questions rather than freight questions, but freight decisions drive them, because lead time determines how much you must commit to in advance.
Longer lead times force larger orders, which tie up cash and increase exposure to demand being wrong. This is the real argument for air freight in e-commerce: not speed for its own sake, but a shorter commitment horizon and therefore a smaller bet on each forecast.
Cash on delivery and returns
Pakistan's e-commerce market runs substantially on cash on delivery, and that single fact shapes the entire downstream operation. Payment is collected at the doorstep, which means a failed delivery is not merely a logistics cost but an unconverted sale, and reconciliation of collected cash becomes an operational discipline in its own right.
It also drives return-to-origin volumes well above what sellers expect from other markets. Every returned order carries outbound cost, return cost and handling, and the stock comes back needing inspection before it can be resold. Planning that route explicitly — who checks it, where it goes, how quickly it re-enters sellable inventory — is the difference between returns being a cost and returns being a write-off.
Scaling up
- Move from courier to freight once consignments justify it, and calculate rather than assume
- Consolidate at origin as soon as you buy from more than two suppliers in one market
- Import as a registered business from the first commercial consignment
- Check product compliance during sourcing, not after arrival
- Track landed cost per unit, including clearance, delivery and returns, rather than freight per shipment
- Plan peak season capacity before the sale event, not during it
Working out your true landed cost per unit
The number that determines whether an online business is profitable is landed cost per unit, and it is routinely underestimated because sellers track freight rather than total cost. A complete figure includes the product price, freight, insurance, customs duty and taxes, clearance charges, inland delivery, storage, and a realistic share of the losses that occur downstream.
That last element is what most sellers omit. In a market where a meaningful proportion of orders are returned, the cost of failed deliveries and of handling returned stock is a real per-unit cost of doing business, not an exception. So is shrinkage, and so is the write-off on stock that did not sell before it became stale.
Calculating this honestly, per product rather than as a blended average, usually produces two useful discoveries. Some lines are less profitable than they appear once the full chain is counted, and the difference between a well-organised import and a rushed one is larger than the freight rate difference that receives all the attention. Sellers who track it consistently make better sourcing decisions, because they are comparing the right numbers.
ASC Freight supports online sellers with consolidation, freight forwarding, clearance and warehousing and distribution as volume grows. See the e-commerce and retail sector page for how those pieces fit together.
- e-commerce
- retail imports
- consolidation
- inventory
