I grew up in Kathmandu. My family ran a small electronics shop in New Road for two decades, and I watched my father spend more hours wrestling with paperwork and chasing customer payments than actually selling things. When I started Vinoraam two years ago, my mental model was simple: build the thing he would have used.
That sentence sounds obvious. What it actually meant, in practice, took me a year to figure out.
What "built for Nepal" really means
Every ecommerce platform on the market today is built for the wrong customer. Shopify is built for an American merchant whose customers pay with a credit card. WooCommerce assumes you have a developer. Squarespace assumes you're selling lifestyle products to people in cities with Amazon-grade logistics.
Nepal is none of those. A typical Nepali merchant:
- Sells to customers who prefer WhatsApp over email by an order of magnitude
- Receives payments via Khalti, eSewa, FonePay, or cash-on-delivery — not card
- Ships to addresses that don't have postal codes
- Speaks to customers in a mix of Nepali and English, sometimes in the same sentence
- Cares more about getting paid this week than optimizing conversion in six months
Every one of those constraints, by itself, is something you can hack around on Shopify with the right apps. The problem is they compound. A store that needs eight apps to function — one for Khalti, one for WhatsApp, one for COD, one for SMS, one for translations — costs more in monthly fees than the merchant makes in commission, and every app is a separate failure point.
So instead of building "Shopify but in Nepal", we built the entire stack from scratch, with Nepal as the first-class customer instead of an afterthought. WhatsApp checkout is in the core. Khalti, eSewa, FonePay, and COD are in the core. Nepali-English mixed copy is in the core. The address book uses ward-level data instead of postcodes.
The pricing thing
The hardest decision was pricing. The temptation, when you're building for a price-sensitive market, is to undercharge — to sell at NPR 500/mo when you could sell at NPR 2,000.
I made the opposite call. Our Premium plan is NPR 2,000/mo. The reason is that a NPR 500 platform attracts merchants who treat their store as a side experiment. A NPR 2,000 platform attracts merchants who treat it as a business. The first kind churns out in two months. The second kind builds something that lasts.
The commission shrinks as you grow — from 3% on Free to 1% on Premium — because the merchants making more money should keep more of it. The fixed fees pay for the platform; the commission is just the cost of access. As a merchant scales, both numbers should shrink as a percentage of their revenue, and ours do.
Why I'm staying here
People ask me, regularly, why I'm not in Bangalore or Singapore or San Francisco. The honest answer is that the best place to build the thing my father needed is a five-minute walk from where his shop used to be.
I sit across from merchants every week. I watch their actual checkout flows on their actual phones. I see what breaks when the power goes out, when the internet drops to 2G, when the bank changes a webhook URL without warning. None of those are problems that anyone in Singapore is going to fix in a useful way.
This is also why founding-member pricing exists. The first 100 paid stores get a direct WhatsApp line to me, for life. Not because it scales — it obviously doesn't. Because the early merchants are the ones teaching me what to build, and they should keep that access as long as they're with us.
What's next
We're shipping six months of work in the next quarter: better analytics, multi-language storefronts, ledger integration with Tally and Khatabook, and a wholesale module for stores that want to sell to retailers as well as consumers. None of those things matter to anyone who isn't already running a store on Vinoraam, which is the right way to think about a product roadmap.
If you're reading this and you're considering starting a store — start. Free, no card, takes 5 minutes. If you're reading this and you have a store already, on us or on something else, message me on WhatsApp and tell me what's broken about your day. I'll answer.
— Raunak