Interview with Ben YI - Managing Director, Daraz Pakistan: ‘The real breakthrough will come from frequency’

Ben Yi is an accomplished e-commerce leader with a notable tenure at Alibaba Group. He oversees Daraz operations in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, utilizing his expertise to drive the company’s growth.

Ben joined Alibaba Group in 2015. He previously led B2B global marketing and business development teams to grow the Alibaba ecosystem with global strategic partners. He also led the global business development team for Tmall Import and Export to help global brands enter China through Tmall Global in both platform and direct sourcing models. Ben joined Lazada as regional head of cross border business in 2018. Prior to undertaking his current role in Daraz Group, Ben served as Chief Business Officer of Lazada Philippines.

Ben holds an MBA degree from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and a bachelor’s degree in commerce from McMaster University in Hamilton.

Following are the edited excerpts of his recent conversation:

BR Research: You have recently taken over as Managing Director of Daraz Pakistan, but the market itself is not new to you. Having visited Pakistan regularly over the years, what changes have stood out to you most, both in consumer behaviour and in the wider retail landscape?

Ben Yi: What has changed most is the maturity on both sides of the market. Since taking on the role, I have spent a lot of time meeting brands, sellers, and partners, and what stands out is the ambition. Businesses are thinking much more seriously about digital distribution and long-term brand building, while global brands are increasingly viewing Pakistan as a meaningful growth market.

Consumers have evolved just as quickly. They are more selective, more value-conscious and more demanding on assortment, delivery, and consistency. That behaviour is also spreading beyond the major cities. Pakistan is moving from being a market where e-commerce was largely about access and experimentation to one where digital is increasingly influencing how people shop and how businesses plan for growth.

BRR: Daraz has been part of Pakistan’s e-commerce landscape for more than fourteen years now. How do you assess the journey so far, and what should the company’s next phase look like?

Ben Yi: The first fourteen years of Daraz were about building access: bringing businesses online, earning consumer trust and creating the logistics and technology required to serve a complex market.

The priority for us now is productivity. We want to bring more businesses into the ecosystem, particularly from outside the major cities, but success cannot be measured simply by the number of sellers. It has to be measured by whether those sellers become stronger businesses.

For smaller sellers, which means better demand insights, assortment, inventory planning, and fulfilment. Established brands need a different level of support, which is why are developing special programmes that are focused on making Daraz easier to operate on and helping proven brands unlock incremental growth. The next chapter would be about improving the quality of participation and not simply expanding it.

BRR: DEX is one example of that evolution, with Daraz’s logistics infrastructure now serving businesses beyond the marketplace. How significant is this shift, and does it point to a broader role for Daraz in Pakistan’s digital economy?

Ben Yi: DEX is significant because it allows Daraz to create value even when the transaction does not happen on our marketplace.Since November 2025, DEX has grown around 6X and now serves more than 200 leading brands. Our distribution centres in Karachi and Lahore can process around 10,000 parcels an hour per sorter, with the wider network capable of handling up to one million parcels a day.As brands build their own websites, social-commerce businesses and omnichannel models, fulfilment becomes shared infrastructure. They should not all need to build a national logistics network independently. DEX allows them to plug into capabilities that already exist and focus their resources on products, customers, and growth.

BRR: Daraz has also recently entered healthcare through its licensed e-pharmacy. Does this signal a broader expansion of what digital commerce can encompass for Daraz?

Ben Yi: It reflects a broader shift from discretionary online purchases towards everyday and essential needs. Healthcare is particularly important because convenience alone is not enough; consumers also need confidence in authenticity, compliance, and fulfilment.Our licensed e-pharmacy already offers more than 450 products from over 20 pharmaceutical and healthcare brands, with delivery across the cities Daraz serves. We are seeing strong demand as well, with Abbott recording around 8x year-on-year sales growth on the platform.The opportunity is to take the trust, and convenience consumers expect from e-commerce and apply it to categories where reliability matters even more.

BRR: Cash has historically played an important role in Pakistan’s e-commerce journey, but digital payments are growing. How do you see that balance evolving over the next few years?

Ben Yi: Cash was important in helping e-commerce establish trust, particularly with first-time customers. But the balance is already shifting. Roughly 30% of our sales are now paid digitally, with adoption particularly strong for higher-value purchases.I expect that share to rise steadily as digital payments become easier and more rewarding through banks, wallets, and payment networks.Cash helped e-commerce acquire trust; digital payments will help it acquire efficiency. Increased share of prepayment reduces friction across the transaction and creates a healthier operating model for the wider ecosystem.

BRR: AI is becoming increasingly central to both Alibaba and Daraz. Beyond the broader excitement around the technology, where do you see AI making the most meaningful difference to Daraz’s business, customers, and sellers?

Ben Yi: AI can make commerce more relevant for customers and more productive for businesses. For shoppers, that means better search, discovery, and personalisation. For sellers and brands, it can improve demand forecasting, assortment decisions, content creation, and marketing. Internally, it can strengthen customer service, fraud detection, and logistics planning.

Being part of the Alibaba ecosystem gives us access to significant AI capabilities, but the real opportunity is localisation. South Asia has its own languages, shopping behaviours, price sensitivities, and ways of discovering products. AI becomes much more powerful when it understands that context.Used well, it can reduce the distance between what a customer needs and where they find it, and between an entrepreneur with a good product and the opportunity to grow. That is closely aligned with our mission of uplifting communities through commerce.

BRR: Having worked across South and Southeast Asia, how would you assess where Pakistan currently sits in its e-commerce evolution compared with other markets you have seen?

Ben Yi: What is interesting about Pakistan is that consumer demand and entrepreneurial energy have developed faster than some of the systems around them.There is no shortage of consumers willing to shop digitally or businesses willing to sell. The gap is in the depth of the ecosystem around those transactions, from payments and formalisation to logistics density and merchant capabilities.In more mature markets, those supporting layers reinforce one another. That creates higher frequency, lower friction, and stronger economics. Pakistan therefore does not need to recreate consumer demand; it needs to convert existing demand into a more mature operating ecosystem. If that happens, the market can deepen considerably.

BRR: What will ultimately determine whether Pakistan moves from relatively low e-commerce penetration to a much deeper digital-commerce economy?

Ben Yi: The real breakthrough will come from frequency, not simply more people trying e-commerce.

Penetration starts to compound when a customer who previously bought online a few times a year begins using it routinely, and when a business stops treating digital as a promotional channel and starts treating it as a core source of demand.That requires online commerce to solve a genuine problem better than the alternative, whether through assortment, value, convenience, or access where physical retail is limited. On the merchant side, it has to deliver repeat customers and sustainable economics.The inflection point is when buying and selling online becomes habitual rather than occasional.

BRR: Pakistan’s e-commerce potential is often highlighted, but high logistics costs, a large informal retail sector, taxation and regulatory uncertainty remain significant constraints. Which of these is the biggest obstacle to scaling the industry today, and what specifically needs to change?

Ben Yi: The hardest constraint is the economic gap between formal digital commerce and a retail economy that remains substantially informal.Logistics costs can improve with greater density, technology, and scale. It is harder to overcome a structure where becoming documented and visible can mean assuming costs and obligations that informal competitors avoid.

The objective should be to make formalisation commercially attractive through simpler compliance, greater neutrality between equivalent online and offline transactions, and enough policy predictability for businesses to invest with a multi-year view.Digital transactions already create transparency. The opportunity is to use that transparency to broaden the formal economy, rather than placing an increasing burden on businesses that are already documented.

BRR: One noticeable change in Pakistan has been the emergence of a new generation of local consumer brands across categories. What does that tell you about how the country’s retail and entrepreneurial ecosystem is evolving?

Ben Yi: The economics of building a consumer brand are changing. Entrepreneurs can test products, build audiences digitally and reach customers across the country without first investing heavily in physical retail. Consumers, meanwhile, are increasingly willing to try newer local brands when the product and value proposition are strong.

We see this clearly on Daraz. Year to date, we have onboarded close to 200 new brands, with more in the pipeline for the October to December quarter.The challenge is moving from initial traction to sustainable growth. Daraz can help with fulfilment, demand and inventory planning, visibility, and access to customers. Newly onboarded brands have seen an average increase of around 8x in sales on the platform.The opportunity now is not simply to create more brands, but to create the conditions in which the strongest ones can become national businesses much faster.

BRR: Having observed Pakistan for several years and now taking direct responsibility for the business, what would you like Daraz Pakistan, and the wider e-commerce ecosystem, to look like five years from now?

Ben Yi: I would like Pakistan to be producing more businesses that are built through digital commerce, rather than simply businesses that also sell online.The strongest measure of progress would be seeing small sellers develop into professionally run businesses, local businesses become national consumer brands, and more companies use real-time demand to decide what to produce, stock and invest in.

For Daraz, the ambition should be to make that progression easier. If digital commerce can lower the cost of reaching customers and allow a good business in any part of Pakistan to grow nationally without first building a nationwide physical footprint, then we will have created something much more meaningful than a larger marketplace.