Load Shedding and Your Online Business in Pakistan: What the 4,000 MW Shortfall and November's Higher Bills Mean for COD Sellers

Load shedding this month: what has actually happened

Load shedding is hitting online business in Pakistan again, and this time it comes with a higher electricity bill on top. On October 6, ProPakistani reported, citing NTDC sources, that the national power shortfall had crossed 4,000 MW. Cities and villages were facing three to four hours of load shedding a day, and in the LESCO region around Lahore the shortfall was above 1,500 MW, with forced load shedding of one hour after every hour. The reasons given were power plants going offline, lower hydropower, and less diesel and gas for generation.

This week Dawn reported the government's plan for loss-making feeders. Energy Minister Awais Leghari said load shedding will continue on 11kV feeders with losses of 30 percent or more. Those feeders are sorted into five categories, and the daily load shedding rises with each one.

So two sellers in the same city can have very different days. If your office, warehouse or home packing room sits on a high-loss feeder, you may lose power for most of the working day, while a seller two kilometres away loses two hours. The same is true for your customers: the buyer in one neighbourhood picks up your confirmation call, and the buyer on a category 5 feeder has a dead phone and no mobile data.

LESCO is also piloting a new system in Lahore and Kasur that tracks units at the transformer level, which narrows theft checks from a whole feeder of 2,000 to 3,000 consumers down to one transformer of 150 to 200. Over time this could mean load shedding is applied more narrowly. For now, it does not change what you face this week.

Why your November electricity bill will be higher

On October 15 and 16 the Power Division projected a fuel cost adjustment of Rs 2.56 per unit for electricity used in September, to be charged in November bills. That is up from Rs 1.11 for August, and it adds about Rs 32.7 billion to bills nationwide. The final number depends on NEPRA's decision, so treat Rs 2.56 as the expected figure, not the final one.

The Power Division said the adjustment would have been higher without the two to two and a half hours of daily load management it carried out in September. The cost pressure comes from fuel: ProPakistani reported Brent crude above 120 dollars a barrel, against roughly 70 dollars assumed in the base tariff, with the Strait of Hormuz closure and Qatar's force majeure on LNG squeezing supply. The Power Division has also warned that winter gas demand may tighten supply further.

In plain words: load shedding is partly how the government is keeping your bill from rising even more. Expect both to continue into the winter rather than end next week.

The hidden problem: your customers' phones and mobile data

For a COD seller, the bigger risk is not your bill. It is whether you can reach the buyer. Every COD order depends on a confirmation call or WhatsApp message, and on the rider being able to call the customer at the door.

Mobile networks struggle during long outages. In July the federal government formed a committee to look at exempting telecom towers from load shedding. ProPakistani reported that telecom companies can usually keep service running through outages of three to four hours, but longer outages seriously disrupt them, and some districts were facing up to 14 hours a day. In August, Jazz and Ufone users reported mobile data slowing or stopping during power cuts, with some calls needing three attempts to connect. In late September PTA started physical checks of batteries, generators and solar systems at towers in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Multan, Faisalabad, Quetta, Abbottabad and Muzaffarabad.

What this means for you: a customer who does not answer at 7pm may not be ignoring you. Their phone may be dead, or the tower near them may be down. If you cancel or ship unconfirmed orders by the same rules as in a normal month, you will lose good orders and send out bad ones.

A worked Rs example: the bill versus the returns

Example. These are made-up figures to show the method, not data from any store. Put in your own numbers.

A small Lahore seller ships 25 COD orders a day, about 750 a month, from a home office and packing room that uses 400 units of electricity a month.

In this example the higher electricity bill costs about Rs 1,000 a month, while a few extra returns from failed calls cost about ten times that, before counting ad spend on the lost orders. The lesson: spend your effort on reaching customers and dispatching on time, not on worrying about the extra units.

What to do this week

1. Find your feeder's schedule. Ask your DISCO's helpline or check its website for your feeder, and plan packing and booking around the hours you have power. Do the same check for your courier's pickup point if you drop parcels yourself.
2. Move confirmation calls into two or three windows a day instead of one, so a customer who was in a power cut at 2pm gets another try at 7pm. Do not cancel an order after one missed call this month.
3. Send a WhatsApp message before you call. A message waits on the phone until the network comes back; a missed call does not tell the buyer anything.
4. Keep your own phone and router alive. A UPS for the router and a charged power bank for the confirmation phone matter more this month than any new app.
5. Book courier pickups early in the day. If your packing room loses power in the afternoon, you still want the day's parcels handed over.
6. Watch return rates by city for the next four weeks. If returns rise in one city or one area, it may be outages there, not a bad product. Hold off on cutting that city until you know.
7. Budget for the November bill. Use your September units times Rs 2.56 as a rough guide, and adjust when NEPRA confirms the figure.

How to tell an outage problem from a real RTO problem

Load shedding makes your numbers noisy. A spike in unreachable customers or refused parcels in October could be the season, or it could be a creative or a courier going wrong. Look at three things side by side: return rate by courier, by city and by product. If every product is worse in one city, the cause is probably local, such as outages or a courier branch. If one product is worse everywhere, the cause is the product or its ad.

RabbitROI shows return rates by courier, city and product, and net profit per ad campaign after returns, ad spend, product cost and shipping, so you can see whether a bad week is the grid or the campaign. Whatever tool you use, make the decision on at least two to three weeks of data, not one bad evening.

What to watch next

• NEPRA's final decision on the September fuel adjustment, which sets the actual figure on November bills.
• Whether the federal committee recommends exempting telecom towers from load shedding. Its deadline was three months from early July.
• Gas supply into winter. The Power Division has said colder weather may restrict gas further, which affects power plants.
• Any change to the feeder categories in your area as the transformer-level system spreads beyond the Lahore and Kasur pilot.

FAQ