What makes eCommerce here different
Cash on delivery dominates, and it changes the arithmetic completely. An order is not revenue until it is accepted at the door, and refusal rates of a meaningful share are normal. A campaign optimized on orders rather than delivered orders will scale the wrong ads, because the audiences most likely to click impulsively are also the most likely to refuse.
Marketplaces and social sellers hold the demand. Daraz owns much of the product search, and a large volume of retail happens entirely inside Facebook and Instagram comments. Your own store competes with both, and the winning position is rarely price.
Repeat purchase is where the margin is. First orders after ad cost and delivery often break even at best. The second and third orders carry the business, which makes retention a marketing job rather than an operations one.
Which channels earn their place
- Meta Ads as the primary acquisition channel, because discovery here happens in feeds rather than in search: Meta Ads for eCommerce brands and catalog and dynamic product ads.
- Google Shopping and search for known-item demand, where someone already knows the product and is looking for a supplier: Google Ads for eCommerce and Shopping Ads. Nepal is a supported Merchant Center country, so a feed can run here.
- Category and product SEO for the searches Daraz does not serve well: brand plus product, local specifics, and the products you are the official source for: eCommerce SEO.
- Retention through email, SMS and WhatsApp. Abandoned cart, order updates, replenishment and win-back, which cost almost nothing per message and lift the numbers that matter: automation for eCommerce and retail.
- Conversion work on the store itself. Mobile speed, the checkout, and the confidence signals that reduce cash-on-delivery refusal: conversion rate optimization.
Getting the measurement right
This is where most stores go wrong. The chain that has to be joined up: ad click, add to cart, order placed, order confirmed, order delivered, order paid. Most stores measure to “order placed” and optimize on it, which rewards the campaigns producing the most refusals.
The fix is to feed delivered-order value back to the ad platforms, through offline conversion imports or a server-side event, so bidding optimizes for orders that actually complete. It takes work to set up and it changes which campaigns look profitable, sometimes dramatically. The Pixel and Conversions API setup and Google Ads conversion tracking pages cover the mechanics.
How an engagement runs
- Unit economics first. Product margin, delivery cost, refusal rate and repeat rate, which together decide what an order can cost. Without these, no budget decision is meaningful.
- Measurement to delivered order, including feeding it back to the platforms.
- Feed and catalogue hygiene, since both Meta and Google campaigns depend on product data being correct, in stock and priced accurately.
- Acquisition on the primary channel, usually Meta, with creative built for the products that carry margin rather than the ones with the most stock.
- Retention sequences for cart abandonment, post-purchase and replenishment, which typically pay for themselves fastest.
- Reporting on contribution margin by channel, not revenue, so a channel producing high revenue at negative margin is visible.
What I see most often
- Campaigns optimized on placed orders, scaling the ads that generate refusals.
- No retention marketing at all, so every month starts from zero.
- A product feed with wrong prices or out-of-stock items, which wastes budget and gets accounts flagged.
- Competing with Daraz on price rather than on the searches Daraz serves badly.
- Checkout that requires an account, on a market that abandons at the first form.
- Delivery cost left out of the margin calculation, so profitable-looking campaigns lose money.
Full stack for this industry
See eCommerce SEO, Google Ads for eCommerce, Meta Ads for eCommerce brands and automation for eCommerce and retail. For platform-level SEO, see Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento.