Courier problems in Pakistan: what is actually broken, and what you can control

Courier problems are the single most common thing brand owners raise with me, and the conversation usually starts in the same place: a list of what the courier is doing wrong. Most of that list is accurate. Almost none of it is actionable, which is why the conversation tends to repeat every few months without anything improving.

So I want to split the problem into two parts. What is genuinely structural about Pakistani logistics and will not be fixed by you. And what is actually within your control, which is considerably more than most brands assume.

Part one: what is structurally broken

It is worth naming these honestly, because understanding them stops you from expecting a courier to solve something they structurally cannot.

Pakistan has no standardised addressing system. Riders navigate by phone call and landmark. That is the root cause of a large share of failed first attempts, and no courier can engineer around it entirely.

Cash on delivery dominates checkout. That ties up courier working capital, introduces refusal risk at the door, and slows the entire cash cycle for everyone in the chain.

Last-mile delivery is largely gig labour with high turnover. Consistent service quality and local address knowledge are hard to sustain when the rider changes frequently.

There is no dedicated regulator overseeing courier service standards or dispute resolution. Redress is largely informal, which is why escalations often disappear into a private channel with no resolution timeline.

The industry has competed on price rather than coverage. New entrants have historically started rate wars in cities already served rather than expanding into underserved ones, pushing rates to levels that cannot sustainably cover both the delivery and return legs. Some have burned through funding and shut down, stranding merchants' cash.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it is a live risk. Before you route significant volume through a courier offering rates that look too good, ask yourself whether the economics work for them. If they do not, your money is sitting inside a business that may not be there next quarter.

Part two: the four things you actually control

1. Return-to-origin — the biggest one by far

RTO is the largest profit leak in Pakistani eCommerce, and the majority of it is caused before the parcel ever reaches the rider.

Run the arithmetic on your own business once. A returned COD order costs you the outbound leg, the return leg and the handling, and earns nothing. So each return consumes the profit from several successful orders. At the return rates common in footwear and apparel here, most of your winners are paying for your losers.

The system that fixes it:

• Confirm every COD order before dispatch. A WhatsApp message or call that verifies intent, checks the address and phone number, and states what is arriving and when. This is the highest-return operational change available to almost any Pakistani store, and most brands still do not do it consistently.
• Do not ship unconfirmed orders after reasonable attempts. Shipping to an unresponsive number is a decision to pay two courier legs for nothing.
• Score orders by risk. Repeat customers with complete addresses behave completely differently from first-time orders with partial addresses in problem areas. Treat them differently.
• Message on dispatch and before delivery. Many refusals happen because the customer forgot, or expected it earlier. Communication closes most of that gap.
• Make your advertising accurate. Every exaggeration in the creative becomes a refusal at the door that you pay for twice.
• Fix sizing on the product page. In apparel and footwear, real measurements and honest fit notes prevent more returns than any post-purchase process.
• Incentivise prepayment. Even a small discount converts some COD orders to prepaid, and prepaid orders return at a fraction of the rate.

2. Reconciliation — where money quietly disappears

The merchant complaint about couriers is almost never really about parcels. It is about money: per-kilogram charges that do not match the quoted rate, and COD collections showing as delivered without the corresponding payout arriving on a predictable schedule.

Merchants have reported significant discrepancies between parcels shipped and amounts settled, with branch managers and support unresponsive on follow-up. Whether that is process failure or something worse, the defence is the same.

• Reconcile every settlement cycle. Not quarterly, not when something feels wrong. Every cycle, against your own order records rather than against the courier's dashboard.
• Keep an independent record of consignment number, order value, date shipped, date delivered and amount settled. If your only record is the courier's system, you cannot dispute anything.
• Query discrepancies immediately and in writing. Escalations raised weeks later rarely get resolved.
• Understand your deductions line by line before you commit volume — freight, COD handling percentage, fuel surcharge, tax, return charges. Ask for it in writing.

3. Courier mix — stop being single-courier

Running one courier is the most common operational mistake I see. It gives you no leverage on rates, no fallback when a network has a bad week, and no data about whether your problems are actually yours.

• Run at least two. Track delivery success rate, average delivery time and RTO rate by courier and by city. Aggregate numbers tell you nothing actionable.
• Route by strength. Some networks are materially better in remote areas of KPK and Balochistan; others are stronger on urban density or COD-specific corridors. Send each parcel through the network that performs where it is going.
• Match the courier to the order value. Higher-value, time-critical orders justify a premium network with better tracking accuracy. High-volume, price-sensitive items do not.
• Weigh payout speed properly. A slightly higher rate from a courier that settles quickly can be worth more than a cheaper rate that ties up your working capital for weeks — particularly if you are reordering inventory from that cash.

4. Negotiation — most merchants simply never ask

Published courier rates are a ceiling, not a quote. Volume, consistent booking patterns and a low RTO rate are the levers that move you off the retail card.

One documented example: an online clothing store shipping around 150 parcels a month at roughly 1.5kg each cut its monthly express spend from about PKR 45,000 to around PKR 29,500 — a 34% reduction — purely by renegotiating the account rate.

Go in with data. Your monthly volume, your RTO rate, your growth trajectory, and what a competing network has quoted. A low return rate is genuinely valuable to a courier, so if you have done the RTO work in section one, you have earned a better rate and should ask for it.

Handling the disputes you will still have

Some things will go wrong regardless. A few practices make those cases resolvable:

• Challenge fake delivery attempts with evidence. If a parcel is marked "customer unavailable" and your customer confirms no call came, raise it with the consignment number, the timestamp and the customer's statement. Ask specifically for rider contact logs.
• Understand the re-attempt policy before you need it. Parcels returned after a single failed attempt are a common and largely avoidable loss.
• Photograph high-value parcels at packing. It is the only defence against a damage or short-content claim.
• Know your insurance process and its realistic timeline before you have a lost parcel, not after.

What the industry needs to fix

To be fair to the couriers, some of this is genuinely on them, and part of why the Pakistan eCommerce Association exists is to press on it: automatic same-day COD reconciliation once cash is deposited, accountability for delivery attempts logged without a call, transparent invoicing so merchants can see every deduction, service-level commitments with actual consequences, and a real re-attempt policy before a parcel is returned.

Those are reasonable asks and we will keep making them. But none of them are conditions for you fixing your own numbers, and waiting for the industry to improve is not a strategy.

If courier costs and returns are eating your margin and you want the whole operation reviewed properly, that is the kind of problem I work on. There is also a full breakdown of the largest player in the TCS case study.