The State Bank of Pakistan's Quarterly Report on Payment Systems for Q2 FY26 puts digital channels at 92% of retail payment transactions, up from 88% a year earlier. Of 3.4 billion retail transactions in October to December 2025, 3.1 billion were digital. Now the number that should worry you. Within Raast, the instant payment system, person-to-person transfers ran at 603 million transactions. Person-to-merchant transfers ran at 33.6 million. Your customers have gone digital. Most shops have not. That gap is the whole story.
What does the 92% figure actually mean for a small shop?
It means the habit has already changed and you are the one who has not caught up. Not that 92% of your counter sales are card or wallet. Someone paying their electricity bill, sending money to family, topping up a phone or buying from a marketplace is doing it on an app. Mobile apps alone carried 2.6 billion transactions, about 83% of all digital payments, worth roughly Rs40 trillion. The muscle memory of opening an app to pay is fully formed. Then that same person walks into a shop and is told cash only. They pay, because they have to. But the friction registers, and next time there is an alternative that does not have it, they take it.
Why is person-to-merchant so far behind person-to-person?
Because P2P needs nothing from the shopkeeper and P2M needs a decision. That is most of it. The rest is the reasons owners actually give, and they are not stupid ones. Merchant discount rates eat into thin margins. Settlement takes a day or two when cash is available tonight. A documented digital trail feels like an invitation for questions later. And the person on the counter has to learn something new during a busy afternoon. I run a retail business alongside Devsio, so none of that reads as an excuse to me. It reads as a real set of costs. The point is only that they now have to be weighed against a cost on the other side, which is customers who expected to tap and could not.
What should a small business set up first?
A Raast QR code, because it costs you nothing and settles instantly into your account. Not a card machine. Not a payment gateway. A printed QR next to the till, accepted by every major banking app in the country. If you do nothing else after reading this, do that. After that, in the order that usually makes sense: Most shops jump straight to the last one, spend money on a gateway integration, then discover the orders were never going to arrive that way.
- A JazzCash or Easypaisa merchant account, since a large share of your customers hold a wallet rather than a bank account
- A card terminal, but only once you can see from your own numbers that people are asking for it
- An online payment gateway, and only when you are genuinely selling online rather than taking orders on WhatsApp
Does taking digital payments mean giving up cash on delivery?
No, and treating it as a choice is the mistake. Cash on delivery still carries a large share of Pakistani ecommerce because it solves a trust problem, not a payments problem. The customer does not doubt the app. They doubt whether the parcel will contain what the picture showed. So the way to reduce your COD share is not to remove the option. It is to remove the doubt: real photographs of the actual item, a returns policy someone can find without hunting, a phone number that a human answers, and reviews from customers who can be verified. Then offer a small discount for paying in advance and let people choose. Removing COD before you have earned the trust just removes the order. If you sell online, the checkout itself is usually the bigger leak, and the reasons people abandon it are well documented rather than mysterious. I went through those in detail in this breakdown of why shoppers abandon a WooCommerce checkout, and most of it applies here without changing a word.
What breaks when payments go digital and the back office does not?
Your reconciliation, and it breaks quietly. With cash, the drawer is the record. Once money arrives across four channels, the day's takings live in a bank statement, a JazzCash dashboard, an Easypaisa dashboard and a card settlement report, and none of them line up with your sales register without someone doing the work. This is the part nobody warns owners about. You add a payment method to make life easier for customers and add half an hour to somebody's evening, every evening. The fix is to have the billing system record the payment method on the invoice at the point of sale, so the day closes with a split you can check against each provider in minutes. If your books currently live in a package rather than a system built round your counter, it is worth reading my honest comparison of Busy, Tally, QuickBooks and going custom before you spend anything.
What this looks like done properly
A customer pays however they want. The counter records which method it was. The day's report shows cash, wallet, card and bank transfer as separate lines that each reconcile to their own source. Nobody stays late. That is not an expensive system. It is a decision made at the right time, before four payment methods and a spreadsheet have turned into somebody's second job.
Where to start this week
- One. Print a Raast QR and put it where customers can see it, not under the counter.
- Two. For one week, ask every customer who pays cash whether they would rather have paid another way. Write down the answers.
- Three. Add a payment method field to your invoice, even if it is a column in a register for now.
- Four. Only after those three, decide whether a card machine or a gateway is worth the fee.
Related reading
- If your category has to report invoices to the FBR in real time, the payment method field is only part of the job: what FBR POS integration really involves.
- Once every sale is itemised, the first report worth building is the ageing one: dead stock is the most expensive thing in your warehouse.
- Why I run a counter as well as an agency, and why it changes the advice: nine years in electrical trading and what it taught me about software.
If you are not sure what your shop needs
Tell me how customers pay you now and how the day gets closed. I will tell you which of this is worth doing for a business your size and which is a distraction, and I will say plainly if the honest answer is a QR code and nothing else. Free consultation at devsioservices.com/contact, or read about the POS and billing work at devsioservices.com/services/pos-software-development.
