Start a Print on Demand Business in Pakistan | My 2025 Guide
By

My 2025 Guide: How to Start a Print on Demand Business in Pakistan

 

A few years ago, I was sitting at my desk in Karachi, staring at a K-electric bill that seemed to defy physics. I had a decent job, but I felt like I had no control, and my creative energy was just collecting dust. The idea of “making money online” was a vague concept I’d see on YouTube, usually pitched by someone standing next to a Lamborghini. It felt like a different world, a game that wasn’t meant for us here in Pakistan.

I’m not a guru, and I won’t promise you overnight financial freedom. What I will share is the real, unfiltered story of how I navigated the frustrating, expensive, but ultimately rewarding process of turning a simple creative idea into a profitable online business from right here in Pakistan. This isn’t theory from a textbook; these are the critical lessons I learned from my mistakes and successes. This is how you can start a print on demand business of your own.

 

My First Big Decision: Choosing Print on Demand Over Dropshipping

 

Like many, the first rabbit hole I fell into was dropshipping. The idea is intoxicating: sell products from a massive catalog without ever touching the inventory. I spent a month researching suppliers on AliExpress, but from a Pakistani perspective, I saw major problems.

  • Shipping Nightmares: Imagine a customer in the UK or USA orders from my store. The product ships from China. The estimated delivery time? Three to four weeks. In a world of Amazon Prime, that’s a recipe for angry customers and bad reviews.
  • Zero Quality Control: I wanted to build a brand I was proud of, but I’d have no control over the product quality. If a supplier sent a flawed item, my reputation would be on the line.
  • Customer Service Headaches: Coordinating a return between a customer in Canada and a supplier in China, all while navigating time zones and language barriers, felt like a logistical nightmare waiting to happen.

This led me to Print-on-Demand (POD). It offered the same key advantage—no upfront inventory costs—but it solved all my biggest concerns. The model is simple: I create a design, upload it to a POD service (like Printify or Printful), and connect it to my online store. When a customer buys a t-shirt with my design, the POD company prints it, packs it, and ships it directly to them. My job isn’t logistics; my job is to be the creative director and the marketer.

I decided to create designs that were uniquely Pakistani, something that would connect with people on an emotional level. I landed on the vibrant, chaotic, and beautiful art form of Pakistani truck art.

 

Building My Digital Dukaan: The Shopify vs. WooCommerce Battle

 

With my product idea sorted, I needed a place to sell it. My research boiled down to two giants: Shopify and WooCommerce. Here’s the practical breakdown for someone in Pakistan.

  • WooCommerce: This is a plugin for WordPress. While it’s technically “free,” that’s misleading. To use it, you have to buy your own web hosting, manage your own security, and pray that a software update doesn’t crash your entire site. I’m tech-savvy, but I’m not a developer. The idea of my store going down and having to fix it myself was a non-starter.
  • Shopify: This is an all-in-one platform for a monthly fee. They handle the hosting, security, and speed—everything. It costs more upfront, but it offers peace of mind. I made a key decision: I wanted to be a business owner, not an IT manager.

I chose Shopify and never looked back. The setup was incredibly smooth. However, I immediately hit the wall every Pakistani entrepreneur faces: getting paid. Shopify Payments, their main payment processor, doesn’t work in Pakistan. This is a deal-breaker if you don’t know the workaround.

After some frantic research, I found the solution: third-party payment gateways. I integrated 2Checkout into my store. The approval process took a few weeks and required submitting business details, but once it was set up, I could accept credit card payments from anyone, anywhere in the world.

 

My First Sale, First Panic, and Biggest Lessons

 

To get started, I ran a small, targeted Facebook ad aimed at Pakistani expats living in London, with a budget of just $5 a day. For three days, nothing but crickets. I was sure I had wasted my money. Then, on the fourth day, my phone made that glorious “cha-ching” sound from the Shopify app.

I had a sale. A real person in the UK had paid real money for my design. It was one of the most validating moments of my life. That excitement was quickly followed by a series of hard lessons that shaped my entire approach to how I start a print on demand business.

Lesson 1: Profit Is in the Margins, Not the Sale. In my excitement, I had miscalculated my shipping costs. The shirt sold for $25. But after the cost of the shirt ($12), the POD company’s shipping fee ($8), and Shopify’s transaction fee ($1), my actual profit was a measly $4. I had to get serious about my numbers, creating detailed shipping profiles for each region and pricing my products to ensure a healthy profit margin of at least 30%.

Lesson 2: Mockups Are Everything. My first product photos were the standard, flat images provided by the POD company. They were boring. I invested a small amount in a subscription to Placeit, a service that lets you create realistic mockup images of models wearing your designs. The difference was night and day. My conversion rate nearly doubled overnight because customers could finally see what the product would look like on an actual person.

Lesson 3: Customer Service Is Your Best Marketing. I got my first return request from a customer who ordered the wrong size. My first instinct was to panic. But then I remembered all the terrible customer service I had received from local brands. I decided to do the exact opposite. I replied immediately, apologized for the confusion, and sent her a replacement in the correct size for free, telling her to keep the original. She was so impressed that she posted about the experience on a large Pakistani community page on Facebook. That single act of good service brought me more new customers than my ads did all week.

 

Conclusion: From Stuck in Karachi to Selling to the World

 

Building that small POD store didn’t make me a millionaire. But it did something more important: it broke the illusion that I was trapped. It gave me a new source of income that I controlled, it validated my creativity, and it proved that it was possible to participate in the global digital economy from right here in Pakistan.

This journey isn’t about finding a magical “hack.” It’s about a series of small, intentional steps. It’s about choosing a low-risk model that plays to your strengths, picking the right tools to save you time and headaches, and most importantly, being ready to learn from your inevitable mistakes. The path from feeling helpless to making your first international sale is paved with these small, consistent actions.

Your journey doesn’t start with a grand business plan. It starts with a single design, one product listing, and a small, targeted ad. Take that first step.