"Start selling online for free" is one of the most tempting phrases for any Nepali shop owner. And it's not a lie — you really can open a store on a free plan, share the link on Facebook, and take your first order without paying a single rupee upfront. But "free" always has a price tag somewhere. It's just moved to a place you don't see until you're three orders deep during Dashain.
This is an honest breakdown of what free e-commerce plans in Nepal actually give you, what they quietly take back, and how to know when it's time to pay.
What "free" usually includes
Most free tiers — whether it's a global tool or a Nepal-focused platform — give you a real, working foundation:
- A basic online store with a handful of products and a checkout page.
- A shareable link you can post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Viber.
- Order and inventory tracking at a basic level, so you're not managing everything in a notebook.
- Mobile-friendly pages, which matters because most of your customers in Nepal are buying from a phone.
For someone testing whether their momo masala, handmade pashmina, or thrift clothing actually sells, this is genuinely enough to start. Don't underestimate it — proving demand for free is smart business.
What you're usually giving up
Here's where you need to read the fine print carefully, because these limits decide whether the free plan grows with you or traps you.
1. Transaction fees on every sale
Many free plans take a percentage of each order in exchange for the "free" hosting. A 2% cut sounds tiny — until you do the math on a Tihar rush. If you sell NPR 3,00,000 in a month, a 2% fee is NPR 6,000 gone. That's often more than a paid plan would have cost you for the whole month. Free plans tend to be cheap when you're small and expensive when you're growing — the exact opposite of what you want.
2. No custom domain (or it's locked behind upgrades)
On free tiers, your store address usually looks like yourshop.someplatform.com instead of yourshop.com.np or yourshop.com. This matters more than people think:
- A long, branded-by-someone-else URL looks less trustworthy when a customer is about to send you money.
- It's harder to print on a business card, a delivery sticker, or a shop banner.
- You don't fully own it — if you switch platforms later, you lose that web address and any search ranking attached to it.
3. Limited payment options
This is the big one for Nepal. A global free plan might support international cards beautifully and offer nothing for eSewa, Khalti, or local bank transfer — which is exactly how most of your customers actually want to pay. If your checkout can't accept eSewa or Khalti, you end up doing the awkward dance of sharing a QR code in DMs and manually confirming each payment. That's slow, error-prone, and it leaks sales. Cash on delivery (COD) support also varies — and in Nepal, COD is still how a large share of customers buy, especially outside Kathmandu.
4. Product, staff, and feature caps
Free plans cap something to push you to upgrade: number of products, number of staff logins, or access to useful tools like discount codes, abandoned-cart reminders, or a proper POS for your physical counter. If you run both a shop and an online store, the lack of integrated POS on a free tier means your offline and online stock drift apart — and you oversell during festival season.
5. Reports, branding, and support
Free tiers often show the platform's branding on your store, give you only basic sales reports, and put you at the back of the support queue. When a payment fails at 9 PM during a Dashain sale, slow support costs you real money.
When the free plan is the right choice
Stay on free — and don't feel bad about it — if:
- You're validating an idea and genuinely don't know if it'll sell yet.
- You do fewer than a handful of orders a month and can handle payments manually.
- You have no PAN/VAT registration yet and aren't running this as a formal business.
- Your margins are healthy enough that a per-order fee doesn't sting.
When it's time to upgrade
Move to a paid plan when the free limits start costing you more than the plan would:
- Transaction fees exceed the monthly plan price. Do the simple math: if 2% of last month's sales is more than the upgrade cost, you're losing money by staying free.
- You need real eSewa/Khalti checkout. The moment manual QR confirmations are eating your evenings or causing disputes, automated local payments pay for themselves.
- You're registering for PAN/VAT. A formal business needs proper invoices, tax-friendly records, and reports you can hand to an accountant — things free tiers rarely do well.
- You're running a physical shop too. If you want one synced stock count across your counter (POS) and your website, you've outgrown a basic free store.
- Festival season is coming. Before Dashain–Tihar volume hits, you want reliable payments, COD logic, courier/delivery handling, and support that answers fast.
This is exactly the gap built-for-Nepal platforms aim to close. Saauzi, for example, brings eSewa, Khalti, and bank payments, COD-friendly checkout, integrated POS for your physical counter, and local delivery/logistics into one place — so the move off a generic free plan doesn't mean stitching together five tools to handle Nepali reality.
How to decide without overthinking it
Don't pick a platform based on the word "free." Pick it based on the total cost of one month of real selling: plan fee + transaction fees + the hours you spend doing manual work the tool should automate. A free plan with a 2% cut and no eSewa can easily cost you more — in money and in lost sleep — than a modest paid plan that just works.
Your takeaway
Start free to prove people want what you sell. But before your next festival rush, run the numbers: add up your transaction fees, check whether eSewa/Khalti and COD are truly supported, and confirm you can use your own domain. The day free starts costing you sales or evenings, that's your signal — upgrade to a plan that grows with you instead of charging you for growing.
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