Pakistan has 117 million people online and 79.9 million social media identities, on a median mobile connection of 24.32 Mbps. Those three numbers decide more about how you sell here than any platform choice.
All figures below come from the Digital 2026: Pakistan report, published in November 2025 with data current to October 2025, drawing on the UN, GSMA Intelligence, Ookla and the advertising planning tools of the platforms themselves. Where a figure is ad reach rather than active users, it says so, because that difference matters when you are budgeting.
How large is the online market in Pakistan?
117 million internet users in a population of 256 million, so 45.6 percent online and 139 million still offline.
Read the shape, not just the size. Internet users grew 1.3 percent while social identities grew 25 percent, so the growth is not new people coming online. It is people already online joining more platforms.
Which platforms actually reach buyers?
TikTok reports the largest adult ad audience at 79.9 million, ahead of YouTube at 54.3 million and Facebook at 52.9 million.
TikTok and LinkedIn publish reach for ages 18 and above only, and LinkedIn counts registered members rather than active users, so these bars are not strictly like for like. Treat them as an order of magnitude, not a league table.
Snapchat at 41.1 million is the figure most store owners here have not priced in. It reaches 35.2 percent of the online population, and almost nobody in the local market is buying inventory there, which is usually where cheap results live.
Where the growth is
Year-on-year change in reported reach, which shows where attention is moving rather than where it sits today.
The YouTube decline is a reporting artifact as much as a behaviour change: platforms revise and purge audience estimates, and Google refreshes these figures only every three to six months. Do not move budget on one negative quarter.
What 24 Mbps means for your store
The median mobile download speed is 24.32 Mbps. Your product page has to be usable at half that.
61.2 percent of the population lives rurally, where the median is the optimistic case. A theme that ships a 4MB hero video is not a design decision here, it is a revenue decision.
Who you are actually selling to
Young, mobile, and on platforms whose reported audiences skew heavily male.
- Median age 20.6. 13.3 percent of the population is 18 to 24 and 15.2 percent is 25 to 34. Your buyer is younger than most product photography assumes.
- 61.2 percent rural. Outside the cities the constraint is delivery, not discovery. Courier coverage decides which ads are worth running at all.
- Reported audiences skew male. 71.2 percent of the adult TikTok audience and 79.2 percent of the Facebook audience. Part of that is genuine access disparity and part is account reporting, but either way, reaching women through these platforms costs more than the raw numbers suggest.
- 68.4 percent of internet users are on social. Search still matters, but discovery here starts in a feed far more often than in a search box.
What the numbers tell you to do
Five decisions follow directly from the data above, and none of them are expensive.
- Build for a mid-range Android on cellular data. Test on a throttled connection before launch, not after.
- Lead with vertical video. The largest reachable audience in the country sits on a platform that accepts nothing else.
- Offer cash on delivery, and show it before the address field rather than at the last step.
- Put WhatsApp on every page. A conversation converts where a card form does not.
- Buy where competitors are not. Snapchat reaches a third of the online population with almost no local advertisers bidding.
Which platform do Pakistani stores actually run on?
Shopify hosts 54.4 percent of catalogued stores and WooCommerce 37.2 percent. Between them that is 92 percent of the market.
Everything else combined is under 2 percent. If you are choosing a platform, you are choosing between two, and both have a local developer pool. The comparison is in Shopify versus WordPress.
The revenue split is more lopsided than the store split. Shopify accounts for 58.5 percent of estimated monthly sales at $1.41 billion, while WooCommerce carries 37 percent of the stores but only 9.2 percent of the sales at $221.8 million. Custom-built carts, which are 5.25 percent of stores, produce 23.1 percent of sales, because that is what the largest local retailers build on.
What sells here
Apparel is 27.8 percent of stores and 43.9 percent of sales. Nothing else comes close.
Apparel generates $1.06 billion of estimated monthly sales against $136 million for health and $130 million for computers. It is the most crowded category and still the largest by a factor of eight, which tells you the demand is real rather than that the space is saturated.
The number nobody quotes
97.96 percent of catalogued Pakistani stores do less than $100 in monthly sales. That is 11,890 out of 12,138.
The three upper bands are drawn at a minimum width so they stay visible: at true scale they would be invisible. Read this as the base rate, not as a verdict. Most stores that exist are abandoned or barely launched: a domain, a theme, no traffic and no ads. The tail above $100K a month is only 247 stores in the entire country.
Those figures come from the AfterShip eCommerce statistics for Pakistan, which catalogues live storefronts and estimates their sales. The useful conclusion is not that eCommerce does not work here. It is that the competition at the bottom is almost nonexistent, and everything separating a serious store from those 11,890 is traffic, trust and delivery, which are all buyable.
How to read this data without being misled
Three caveats that matter more than any single figure.
- Ad reach is not active users. Meta states plainly that estimated audience size is not a proxy for monthly or daily active users. It is a planning number, useful for comparing scale, useless as a population count.
- Social identities are not people. One person with three accounts can appear three times, and de-duplication across platforms is imperfect.
- Do not calculate your own year-on-year changes by comparing figures published this year against last year. Sources revise and correct historical data, so use the change figures the report itself states.
- Store counts and sales are estimates from crawled storefronts. The AfterShip tables do not all cover the same store population: 68.4K stores appear in the platform breakdown but only 12.1K in the sales distribution, so treat percentages as directional within a table, not comparable across tables.
To cross-check: Digital 2026: Pakistan for connectivity and platform data, and the Statista eCommerce outlook for Pakistan for revenue modelling, which is partly paywalled and uses its own estimates rather than reported platform data.
Where this leaves a new store
The market is large, young and mobile. The practical barriers are delivery and trust, not audience size.
Nothing in this data suggests a shortage of buyers. It suggests the winning store is the one that loads on a slow connection, takes cash at the door, answers on WhatsApp and shows the product in vertical video. That build is covered in COD, couriers and checkout, the platform choice in Shopify versus WordPress, and the margin maths in the Daraz profit calculator.