How to start a multi-vendor delivery business in Pakistan

A multi-vendor delivery business connects many sellers, such as restaurants, sweet shops, grocers or pharmacies, to customers through one app, and delivers the orders. In Pakistan the idea is attractive for good reasons: busy cities, a culture of ordering from the neighbourhood shop, and many good local businesses with no delivery channel of their own.

It is also a business where the technology is the easy part to get wrong and the hard part to fix later. This guide covers the decisions that matter, in the order you will face them. It is written for founders starting a marketplace, and for existing businesses, such as a distributor or a chain, that want to open their platform to other vendors.

1. Choose a city and a category

The most common mistake is launching too wide. A marketplace has two sides, and both have to be full enough to be useful: customers need choice, vendors need orders. Spreading a small team across several cities or many categories leaves both sides thin everywhere.

Start where you can win:

• One city, or even a few neighbourhoods, where you can visit every vendor yourself.
• One category that people order often, such as food, groceries, or sweets and bakery items, where you can sign enough good vendors to offer real choice.
• A reason to choose you over ordering by phone: better selection in one place, reliable delivery, clear prices, or simply a well-made app in the customer’s own language.

You can add categories and cities later on the same platform. Each new one goes faster once the first is working.

2. Sign vendors on clear terms

Vendors join a marketplace for orders. They stay if the terms are fair, the money arrives as promised and the tools are easy for their staff.

Before you sign the first vendor, decide:

• Commission. What share of each order you keep, and whether it differs by category.
• Payouts. How often vendors are paid and how they can check what they are owed.
• Delivery. Whether the vendor delivers with its own drivers or your riders do (see below).
• Menu and stock. Who keeps prices and availability up to date. In practice it should be the vendor.

On DOBUY each vendor gets its own tools: a vendor app on the counter for new-order alerts, an online/offline switch and order queues, and a vendor portal on a desk for stock, payout and invoice exports. From the admin panel you onboard vendors, set commissions and approve payouts, and vendors can see their daily revenue and payout status. Clear numbers on both sides avoid most disputes.

3. Decide who delivers

There are two workable starting points:

• Vendors deliver. Many shops already have a delivery boy or two. They can run their own drivers and routes from the vendor portal. This is the lightest way to start.
• You deliver. You build a rider team. Orders are dispatched to an available rider automatically, tracked by GPS, and your team can re-assign deliveries from the admin panel. Riders sign up in the rider app, see their earnings per order and confirm each drop-off with a photo or signature.

Many marketplaces start with vendor delivery and add their own riders in the busiest areas once order volume justifies it. If you also carry heavier goods, orders can be matched to a bike, car, van or truck by weight.

4. Plan for cash on delivery

In Pakistan many customers prefer to pay cash on delivery, so plan for it from day one. Offer online payment as well for those who want it, but assume a large part of your orders will be cash.

Cash is manageable when every rupee is tied to an order and a rider. On DOBUY, riders see a daily cash summary in the rider app, the fleet team reconciles cash in the rider portal, and the admin panel keeps the cash ledger next to commissions and vendor payouts. Settle with riders every shift, not every week; small gaps are easy to explain on the day and impossible a week later.

5. Speak your customers’ language

An app in English only works for some of your customers. The DOBUY apps are bilingual, English with Urdu, with right-to-left layouts for the Urdu screens. Vendors and riders can use the language that suits them as well.

6. Launch under your own brand

Your marketplace is your brand, so the apps should be too. With a white-label platform, the customer, vendor and rider apps carry your name, logo and colours, the website runs on your domain, and the mobile apps are published on your own App Store and Google Play accounts. Open developer accounts with Apple and Google in your company’s name early.

7. Take only the apps you need

You do not need everything on day one. A typical starting set for a marketplace in which vendors deliver is the customer app, the vendor app and portal, and the admin panel. Add the rider app and rider portal when you bring delivery in-house, and the buyer website when customers ask to order from a browser. All of them run on the same platform, so adding one later does not mean starting over.

8. Go live, then grow carefully

A typical DOBUY launch runs in four steps: discovery, where we map your model and pick the apps; branding; setup of vendors, zones, delivery charges and payments with your team; and go-live, with the apps published under your store accounts. After launch, watch a few things closely: orders per vendor, late or failed deliveries, cash gaps and vendor complaints about payouts. Fix those before adding the next city.

Where to go next

The industries page shows how the platform fits food, grocery, sweets and other categories. When you are ready to see the apps, request a demo and tell us your city, your category and how you plan to deliver. We reply within 24 hours.