KARACHI: Two relatively small cities in Pakistan topped the list of places where the greatest number of merchants have registered with global ecommerce giant Amazon during the ongoing year, latest research by Marketplace Pulse said, ranking the country in third place for the registration of new sellers.
Marketplace Pulse, a New York-based e-commerce intelligence firm, collects data on some of the biggest businesses in cyberspace including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Wish, and other platforms. The firm maintains up-to-date dataset of millions of Amazon marketplace sellers.
According to its research, Pakistan is the top third country on the list of maximum number of new sellers, with the cities of Sahiwal and Mian Channu leading the way.
Unsurprisingly, the United States and China are at the top of the list.
“The thousands of Pakistani sellers dwarf in comparison to the two largest locations, but that’s more than the rest of the countries in the world, including export hubs like India and neighboring countries like Canada,” the Marketplace Pulse said in a latest statement.
The founder of the research firm said a majority of registrations had come from the two cities in Punjab, followed by Pakistan’s commercial hub Karachi and other major urban centers.
“Over 4,000 sellers from Pakistan have registered to sell on Amazon.com so far this year,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, told Arab News this week. “Most from cities Sahiwal, Mian Channu, Lahore, Multan, and Karachi.”
“The list of cities is ordered by the number of sellers,” he added. “The most so far have been from Sahiwal. The number of registrations has been accelerating month-to-month (over 1,000 so far in June), so I expect by the end of 2022, tens of thousands of Pakistani sellers would have joined Amazon.”
In May 2021, Pakistan was added to the list of countries that were allowed to sell products on Amazon after talks between the e-commerce firm and the country’s authorities which lasted for almost a year.
“This [account opening with Amazon.com] means sellers have registered with the marketplace … but it is not necessary that they have actually sold their products,” Badar Khushnood, member of the government’s National E-Commerce Council, who also played an important role in Pakistan’s inclusion in Amazon’s list, told Arab News on Wednesday.
“Pakistani sellers want to export their goods through e-commerce platforms like Amazon and now they have registered and are analyzing the requirements of the marketplace, such as how to meet its standards, packing and shipping requirements,” he added.
He noted that Pakistan’s inclusion in the list of countries that can sell their products on Amazon validated that people wanted to export various products from the country.
“Now we have to see how many people can export their products to Amazon warehouses across the globe and how quickly they are able to sell the goods,” Khushnood said.
“Registration at the Amazon platform means the trade will be cross-border and things will go out of Pakistan. The cost of shipping at the moment is too high.”
He noted the shipping cost faced by small exporters needed to be curtailed to facilitate them, adding this could be done by “offering them tax rewards etc.”
According to Marketplace Pulse, Pakistan is home to the world’s largest Amazon seller groups. These include “eCommerce by Enablers” with over 1.2 million members, “Extreme Commerce by Sunny Ali” with more than 1.1 million members, and “Ecommerce Success Pakistan” with nearly 200,000 followers.
These groups started years before Pakistani sellers were officially allowed to sell on Amazon.
