Sell Online Without a Marketplace Taking Its Cut
Every shopkeeper I know has had this conversation at least once. A cousin says put your things on Daraz. A niece says just sell on Instagram, everyone does now. Both are half right. Marketplaces bring you buyers you would never meet on your own. What nobody explains properly is what they take in exchange, and it is more than the commission.
So here is the honest version, the one you would get over chiya: what you give up when someone else owns the counter, and when Daraz and Instagram still genuinely earn their place.
The commission maths nobody writes down
Commission looks small until you put it next to your margin. Say you sell a kurtha for NPR 2,000, and after paying your supplier your margin is NPR 500. If commission, payment fees and packaging rules together come to around 12 percent of the sale, that is NPR 240. It did not come out of the NPR 2,000. It came out of the NPR 500 you were going to keep. Nearly half your profit, gone before you have paid for the shutter, the boy who packs parcels, or your own time.
Those numbers are made up to show the shape, and your category will differ. But the shape always holds. The marketplace charges on the selling price, and you live on the margin. A modest looking fee on price can be a brutal fee on profit, and it is due on every order, forever. It never gets cheaper because you got popular.
Your own website is the opposite shape. You pay for the site the way you pay rent: a fixed amount, whether you sell two orders or two hundred. The hundredth order costs nothing extra.
The customer list you never get to keep
This one costs more than the commission, and most people notice it too late.
On a marketplace, the person who bought from you is not your customer. They are the marketplace's customer. You often get only what you need to ship the parcel, and messaging buyers outside the platform is against the rules. Come Dashain, you cannot tell the three hundred people who bought from you this year that new stock has arrived. The marketplace tells them, and it shows them your listing next to six cheaper ones.
A shop's real wealth was never the stock on the shelf. It is the list of people who bought once and would buy again if reminded. Your father kept that list in his head and in a khata. Online, it is names, numbers and order histories, and whoever holds them holds the shop.
When the website is yours, the list is yours. On a Pasal shop, buyers can make customer accounts, every order sends a proper email from your shop's name, and loyalty points give the fourth momo plate or the fifth kurtha a reason to come from you rather than whoever is cheapest that week. There is even a digital khata if you run credit for regulars the way half of Baneshwor does. None of that is possible when the buyer belongs to the platform.
Price control and the discount treadmill
On a marketplace, your product sits in a row of near identical products, sorted by price. The shop below you drops NPR 50 and quietly moves above you. Then the campaign calendar arrives: festival sales, 11.11, free delivery weeks, and joining is voluntary the way standing in a queue is voluntary. Skip the campaign and you vanish from the page.
That treadmill trains customers to wait. Nobody buys in October because November will be cheaper. You end up discounting to people who would happily have paid full price.
Your own shop breaks the line-up. Nobody is stacked beside you. You discount when it suits you: a promo code for Tihar, a counter discount for the aunty who has bought from you for ten years, full price the rest of the time. Price becomes your decision again, which is a strange thing to have to win back, but there it is.
Instagram is a bazaar, not a shop
Instagram deserves its own honesty, because it feels free and every sale through it costs you an evening.
The routine is familiar. Post a photo, "price?" in the comments, "check DM" in reply, then a night of messages: is it available, what colours, can you hold it until Saturday, send your account number. Payment arrives as a screenshot you must squint at. There is no cart, no order record, no price list a customer can browse at midnight without waking you. One person, usually you, is the entire checkout system.
The reach is not yours either. The algorithm decides who sees your new arrivals, and the day it changes its mood, your shop goes quiet through no fault of your stock.
Keep Instagram. It is a wonderful window display. But let the window open onto a real door: photos on Instagram, actual ordering on your own site, where prices sit in NPR next to each item and every order writes itself down.
A name people can find again
Here is the quiet loss with marketplaces: even your success is anonymous. Somebody in Pokhara loves the bag they bought, and what do they remember? Daraz. The tourist who bought a singing bowl in Thamel goes home, wants another for a friend, and searches for what, exactly?
A shop needs an address people can repeat. On the street that is "the electronics shop in New Road, next to the pharmacy". Online it is a domain with your name in it. Type it from anywhere on earth and your shop opens, in Nepali or English, with your products and your prices, at two in the morning your time. That is what a brand actually is: not a logo, just the ability to be found twice.
This used to require a developer cousin and three months of waiting. It is the part Pasal was built for: pick one of the designed templates, put your products in, connect your own domain, and the shop is standing in about five minutes. eSewa and Khalti payments are on the way too, so the checkout will speak the same language your customers do.
When the marketplaces still make sense
Now the other side, because pretending marketplaces are useless would be its own kind of lie.
- When nobody knows you exist. A new shop has no list and no name worth searching. Daraz has the crowd, and your first hundred strangers may well come from there. That is worth commission.
- When you are clearing stock. Last season's inventory does not need brand building, it needs volume, fast, and a festival campaign will move it.
- When the product is a commodity. If your phone covers are identical to everyone else's phone covers, buyers will price-shop anyway, and fighting that on your own site wins you little.
- When delivery is the hard part. Marketplace logistics reach places your own courier arrangements may not, and for a heavy parcel to Ilam, that network matters.
The sensible shape is not either or. Treat the marketplace as a rented stall in someone else's bazaar: good footfall, bad terms. Treat your own website as the shop with your name on the shutter. Keep the name identical in both places, so a customer who met you in the bazaar can find your street.
Start with the door on your own street
You do not have to quit Daraz tomorrow or stop posting reels. Just stop building only on rented ground. Put the permanent shop up first: your products, your prices, your customer list, your domain. Let the marketplaces feed it strangers, and keep the regulars, the margin and the name for yourself.
If you want to see whether it suits your trade, the door is at https://pasal.studio/start. It takes about five minutes, which is less than one night of Instagram DMs.