Daraz vs Your Own Online Store in Nepal: Which One Actually Makes More Money?

Quick answer: Daraz gives you traffic and takes a cut of every sale. Your own online store gives you margin and ownership but you must bring the traffic yourself. For a new seller with no audience, Daraz almost always makes more money in year one. For a seller with repeat customers or a recognised brand, an own store wins, because the commission you stop paying becomes profit and the customer list becomes an asset. The best structure once you are established is both, with different jobs.

I build e-commerce websites in Nepal and I have watched clients run this comparison badly in both directions, spending on a store nobody visits, or staying on a marketplace long after their brand outgrew it. This post gives you the maths so you can decide with numbers instead of opinions.

The market you are selling into

Some context before the maths. Nepal's e-commerce market generated roughly 928 million US dollars in 2025, and Nepal's digital commerce is projected by Statista to keep growing at about 28 percent a year toward 3.94 billion dollars by 2029. Electronics is the single largest category by revenue. On the technology side, WooCommerce hosts the majority of Nepali online stores, which tells you most local shops are built on WordPress rather than custom platforms.

The important part for you: growth this fast means the cost of acquiring a customer is still low compared to mature markets, and it will not stay that way. Sellers who build an owned audience now will pay less for the same customer in three years than sellers who start then.

What selling on Daraz actually costs

Everyone knows about commission. Fewer sellers count the rest of it. Here is the full picture of what leaves your revenue on a marketplace.

Cost	Typical size	Notes
Category commission	Roughly 2 to 13 percent	Lower on some electronics, higher on fashion, home and furniture
Payment handling fee	Around 1.25 percent	Charged on the transferred amount
Campaign and voucher participation	Varies, often 5 to 15 percent off	Optional in theory, close to mandatory for visibility during sale events
Sponsored placement	Whatever you bid	Search results are competitive, organic placement alone is slow
Returns and failed deliveries	Category dependent	Cash on delivery refusals are the quiet killer for fashion
Cash flow delay	Days to weeks	Money arrives after settlement, not at the moment of sale

Verify your own numbers. Daraz publishes its fee structure inside Seller Center and Daraz University, and rates change and differ by category and country. The ranges above are the figures reported publicly at the time of writing, and I could not verify Nepal specific rates on Daraz's own help pages because they load through JavaScript. Treat this table as a framework, then confirm your exact category before you price anything.

The maths nobody does before choosing

Here is a worked example for one product. Assumptions are stated so you can swap in your own numbers, and I have deliberately used a mid range commission rather than a flattering one.

Product: sells for NPR 2,000, costs you NPR 1,200 to buy or make.

Per order	Selling on Daraz	Selling on your own store
Selling price	NPR 2,000	NPR 2,000
Marketplace commission (10 percent assumed)	minus 200	0
Payment handling	minus 25	minus 50 (2.5 percent gateway)
Campaign discount or voucher share	minus 100	0 unless you choose to discount
Returns and failed delivery allowance	minus 60	minus 60
Marketing to win the sale	minus 50 (sponsored placement)	minus 250 (ads, content, social)
Platform and hosting share per order	0	minus 20
Product cost	minus 1,200	minus 1,200
Profit per order	NPR 365	NPR 420
Money reaches you	After settlement, days to weeks	Usually within a few working days
Customer details	Belong to the marketplace	Belong to you

Two things fall out of this table, and they are the whole argument.

First, the profit gap per order is smaller than sellers imagine. Commission looks brutal until you price in what you must spend on advertising to make your own store sell. Traffic is never free, you either pay commission for it or you pay ads for it.

Second, the line that decides everything is the last one. On Daraz you rent the customer for one transaction. On your own store you keep the phone number, the email and the buying history, so the second sale to that person costs you almost nothing. Run the same table for a customer who buys three times and the own store column pulls far ahead, because your marketing cost only appears once.

Where Daraz genuinely wins

• Traffic on day one. Millions of people already browse the app. Your new website has nobody.
• Trust for unknown sellers. Buyers who will not send money to an unfamiliar page will buy the same product on a marketplace.
• Logistics handled. Delivery across districts, cash on delivery collection and returns processing are solved problems.
• No upfront cost. You can list today without paying for a website.
• Demand testing. The cheapest way to learn whether a product sells at all in Nepal.

Where your own store wins

• Full margin on repeat buyers. No commission on the second, third and tenth order.
• You own the customer list. You can message them, retarget them and sell to them again for free.
• You own the brand experience. Your photography, your story, your bundles, no competitor advertisement next to your product.
• Faster cash flow. Gateway settlement in days rather than marketplace payout cycles, which matters when you buy stock.
• Google traffic. Your product pages can rank for searches, which compounds while marketplace listings do not build your brand.
• No sudden rule changes. Nobody can suspend your shop, change your commission or bury your listing overnight.

That last point is the one sellers underrate until it happens to them. It is the same argument I made about social platforms in website versus Facebook page, and it applies with more money at stake here.

What an own store really costs to build and run in Nepal

Item	Typical cost
WooCommerce store build	NPR 1,00,000 to 3,00,000 depending on catalogue and features
Domain	Free with .com.np, about NPR 2,000 per year for .com
Hosting	NPR 3,000 to 15,000 per year, and location matters more than price
Payment gateway	Roughly 2 to 3 percent per transaction, plus integration work
Maintenance	NPR 2,000 to 15,000 per month
Marketing	The real variable, and the one that decides success

The build itself is the easy part, and the full cost breakdown is here. The parts that quietly decide whether a store makes money are payment integration done correctly, which I covered in eSewa and Khalti integration, and speed, because a checkout that stalls on mobile data loses the order. Test any store you run with my free speed checker.

The structure I recommend to clients

Stop treating this as a choice and start treating it as two channels with different jobs.

Stage	What to do
Starting out, no audience	Sell on Daraz. Learn which products move, at what price, with what return rate. Build reviews.
Proven products, some repeat buyers	Build a simple store. Put your website on every package insert and invoice so marketplace buyers can come direct next time.
Established brand	Run both. Daraz for discovery and clearing stock, your store for margin, bundles and loyal customers.
Strong own audience	Your store is the main channel. The marketplace becomes an advertising expense you can measure and cut.

Two practical rules if you run both. Keep prices consistent, because customers who feel tricked stop trusting the brand. And tag every campaign link with my free UTM builder so you know which channel actually produced each sale, rather than guessing.

How to move traffic to your own store

An own store fails for exactly one reason, which is that nobody visits it. The three approaches that work in Nepal right now:

1. Package inserts and invoices. The cheapest customer acquisition available. Every Daraz order is a chance to introduce your website, with a discount code that only works there.
2. Social and video ads. Cheap creative volume beats expensive production, which is the argument in AI video ads for Nepali businesses.
3. Search. Product and category pages that rank for what people type. It is slower, it compounds, and it is what technical SEO is for.

Frequently asked questions

Does Daraz allow me to promote my own website?

Marketplaces generally restrict directing buyers off platform inside listings and chat, so read the current seller policy and stay within it. What you control is your packaging, your invoice and your own social channels, which is where most Nepali sellers build their direct audience.

What is a realistic timeline to make my own store profitable?

Plan for three to six months of building traffic before the store carries itself, assuming you are actively marketing. If you launch a store and do nothing else, it will not sell, no matter how good it looks.

Which platform should my store be built on?

WooCommerce on WordPress for most Nepali sellers, because it handles local payment gateways well and you can manage products yourself. Custom builds make sense for unusual requirements, which I compared in WordPress vs Next.js.

How do I handle delivery from my own store?

Partner with a courier that covers your districts and be honest about delivery times on the product page. Cash on delivery raises conversion in Nepal and raises refusals, so track your failure rate and price it into your margin.

Can you build my online store?

Yes. I build WooCommerce and custom stores with eSewa, Khalti and FonePay integration verified on the server, product catalogues, and the speed and SEO work that makes them findable. Tell me what you sell and I will send a fixed quotation and an honest opinion on whether you are ready for your own store yet.

The marketplace rents you customers. Your own store lets you keep them. Start where the buyers are, then build the asset you own. Talk to me when you are ready for step two.