Most people ask what it costs to build a store. The harder question is what it costs to keep it running. The real cost to run an online store in Nepal is not one number — it is six or seven small recurring lines that quietly add up every month: your platform, your domain, payment gateway charges, delivery, packaging, returns, and the hours you spend packing boxes instead of selling. This guide maps every one of those lines so you can build a budget that survives past your third month.
We are not going to invent price tags. Rates in Nepal change with each fiscal year, and gateway commissions are negotiated per merchant. What we will do is tell you exactly which costs exist, which ones are fixed, which ones scale with orders, and where new sellers consistently lose money without noticing.
The two kinds of cost: setup vs. running
Setup cost is what you pay once — building the site, shooting product photos, printing your first batch of packaging. Running cost is what repeats whether you sell or not.
New sellers obsess over setup and ignore running cost, which is backwards. A custom-built site can look like a bargain until you get the maintenance invoice. If you are still weighing build routes, our breakdown of what an ecommerce website actually costs in Nepal covers the build side in detail, and the follow-up comparing agency prices against no-code alternatives is worth reading before you sign anything.
Line 1: Domain and hosting
A .com.np domain is administered locally and has historically been issued without a registration fee, provided you submit the required documents (citizenship or company registration papers). A .com is paid annually in USD through an international registrar — small, but it renews forever, and renewal prices are usually higher than the first-year promo.
Hosting is where the answer splits:
- Self-hosted (WooCommerce, custom Django/Laravel build): you pay monthly for a VPS or shared hosting, plus SSL, plus backups, plus someone to restart it when it breaks at 11pm during Dashain.
- Hosted platform: hosting, SSL, backups and updates are inside your subscription. There is no separate server bill and no separate person to call.
For a shop doing a few orders a day, self-hosting is rarely cheaper once you count the maintenance retainer. It only wins when you have real developer capacity in-house.
Line 2: The platform subscription
This is your most predictable cost — a flat monthly or yearly fee in NPR. What you should compare is not the sticker price but what is included: are there transaction fees on top? Do you pay extra per staff login, per outlet, or per product? Do you need a paid app for something basic like cash on delivery?
Nepali sellers get burned most often by add-on pricing rather than base pricing. Our comparison of the lowest-cost ways to sell online in Nepal walks through where those extras hide. If you also run a physical counter, check what POS software costs in Nepal before buying two separate systems — paying twice for one business is the single most common budget leak we see.
Line 3: Payment costs (and the COD trap)
Nepali customers pay in three main ways, and each has a different cost shape:
Wallets and QR — eSewa, Khalti, Fonepay
These charge a commission per successful transaction. The rate is set per merchant based on your category and volume, so do not trust a number you read on a forum — request the current merchant rate card directly and get it in writing. Settlement timing matters as much as the rate: money sitting in a gateway for several days is money you cannot use to restock.
Bank transfer
Cheapest per transaction, but it costs you in labour. Someone has to match screenshots to orders by hand, and that reconciliation time is a real cost once you cross a handful of orders a day.
Cash on delivery
COD feels free. It is not. You pay the courier's COD handling charge, you wait for remittance, and you absorb the cost of every refused parcel — return freight plus the item's time out of stock. Setting COD up properly, with phone verification and clear zone rules, is what keeps this line under control; we covered the mechanics in setting up COD orders the right way.
The practical move is to make prepaid attractive — a small discount for eSewa/Khalti payment often costs less than your COD failure rate. The trade-offs are laid out in our look at digital payments versus cash for small Nepali shops.
Line 4: Delivery
Inside the Kathmandu Valley you have same-day and next-day options through services like Pathao Courier and NCM; outside the Valley, rates are usually weight-based per district and slower. Nepal Post is cheap for light items but has no useful tracking for most routes. For international shipping to NRN customers, Aramex and DHL are the reliable routes and are priced in USD by weight band.
Three delivery costs new sellers forget to budget:
- Return freight on refused COD parcels — you pay both legs.
- Volumetric weight — bulky-but-light items (blankets, cushions) get charged on size, not actual weight.
- Festival surcharges and delays — during Dashain and Tihar, couriers run hot and rural deliveries stretch. Build a buffer into both your promised timeline and your margin.
Line 5: Packaging and per-order consumables
Boxes or poly mailers, bubble wrap, tape, thermal or printed labels, and an invoice slip. Per order this looks trivial; across a festival month it is a visible line. Buy in bulk from Ason or a wholesale supplier rather than retail, and standardise on two or three box sizes so you are not paying volumetric charges on half-empty cartons.
Line 6: Tax and compliance
A PAN is the baseline for operating a registered business, and VAT registration kicks in at a turnover threshold that the Inland Revenue Department revises through the annual budget — confirm the current figure with IRD or your accountant rather than relying on last year's blog posts. Once you are VAT-registered, budget for monthly or trimester filing, either your own time or an accountant's fee. Choose a platform that issues compliant bills automatically; retyping invoices into a separate billing tool is a recurring cost measured in hours.
Line 7: The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Your time. Manually copying orders from Instagram DMs into a notebook, checking stock by walking to the shelf, and re-counting inventory after a busy Saturday is unpaid labour — and it causes overselling, which costs you the order and the customer. Running a single stock pool across your counter and your website removes most of it; here is how one shared inventory stops overselling in practice.
How to build your own monthly number
Take a realistic monthly order count — not your hoped-for one — and fill in five figures:
- Fixed: platform subscription + domain (annual ÷ 12)
- Per order: average gateway or COD charge + packaging + delivery you absorb
- Variable: ad spend, if any
- Periodic: accountant, photography refresh, festival stock
- Leakage: your realistic return/refusal rate
Fixed cost divided by order count is your true platform cost per sale. That number shrinks fast as volume grows — which is the argument for a flat subscription over per-transaction pricing.
This is where a single system helps: Saauzi gives you the storefront, the POS counter, one shared inventory and eSewa/Khalti/bank/COD checkout on one NPR subscription, so you are not stacking a website bill on top of a billing-software bill. If you sell both online and over the counter, see how that works in running online and in-store on one platform.
The takeaway
Write your costs down in two columns — fixed and per-order — before you launch, then check the real figures against it after your first full month. Almost every seller finds the surprise on the per-order side: COD returns, volumetric shipping, or gateway commission they never asked about.
If your current setup means paying for a website, a billing tool and a POS separately, consolidating is usually the fastest saving available. Start a free Saauzi store, put your real products and real delivery zones in it, and compare the monthly total against what you pay today.
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