PAKISTAN’s e-commerce sector has really expanded rapidly over the past several years, but the legal framework meant to protect consumers within it has not kept pace. The result is a digital marketplace where fraud is common and meaningful recourse for the affected buyer is rare.

The country’s primary consumer legislation — the Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — and the provincial laws that followed it were written for physical marketplaces. These laws address defective products, false advertising and unfair trade practices in broadly applicable terms, but they were never designed with the specific mechanics of online commerce in mind.

Issues that are now routine in digital transactions — delayed or undelivered orders, counterfeit goods sold as genuine, misleading product listings, and the absence of any clear refund pathway — fall into a legal grey area that existing statutes barely address. The practical conse- quences of this gap are well documented.

Numerous online sellers offer identical products at identical prices, leaving buyers with little ability to distinguish a legitimate vendor from a fraudulent one. Some platforms provide no complaint mechanism at all. In cases where payment has already been collected, certain websites have been known to simply restrict the buyer’s access altogether, leaving no avenue for resolution.

Pakistan’s continued reliance on cash on delivery (COD), which is the dominant payment method, is itself a symptom of this trust deficit, with consumers preferring to pay only after physically receiving the goods. They do so because the alternative offers so little legal protection, if at all.

There is no clear framework establishing platform liability, meaning that market-places hosting third-party sellers face minimal legal obligation when those sellers defraud a buyer. Consumers falling prey to a fraudulent listing often have no identi-fiable party to pursue a complaint against. All they have is a storefront that may not even exist by the time a dispute is raised.

Addressing the issue requires legislative attention specific to digital commerce: mandatory disclosure requirements for online sellers, defined platform liability for marketplaces that knowingly host fraudulent vendors, and an accessible, enforceable redressal mechanism for online transactions. Pakistan’s e-commerce sector will continue to grow regardless of whether this gap is closed. Whether or not the consumers are protected is a separate question entirely, and it is one that the existing legal framework has yet to answer.

Maheen Zahra
Lahore

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2026