Muhammad Imran and the classroom behind the shopping cart

Muhammad Imran puts a precise date on the beginning: May 13, 2017. The business was Manisofts, an e-commerce consulting agency in Bhakkar, Pakistan. Its work would involve products, suppliers, listings and the small decisions that determine whether an online shop makes money. For a business conducted through screens, the place matters. Manisofts gives its address as an IT plaza on Jhang Road. The global marketplace has a local front door.

There is something appealingly practical about that combination. Amazon supplies the vast marketplace; someone still has to decide what belongs on the shelves. Imran’s company offers to help with that work. Wholesale, online arbitrage and private label are its recurring subjects, alongside account management and advertising. The language can sound technical. The underlying questions are familiar to any shopkeeper: What should I buy? What can I sell it for? When should I order more?

Imran’s public account of his business keeps returning to two groups: clients trying to run stores, and people learning how to help them. That gives his founder’s story its particular shape. It runs from a dated beginning in 2017 to a company message about international customers, and from the mechanics of selling to a more local ambition: teaching people in Bhakkar how to participate.

A date, a plaza, a division of labour

In his founder’s message, Imran identifies himself as Manisofts’ founder and chief executive officer. He describes a company that has expanded its workforce and developed relationships with clients in Europe, America and the UK. His emphasis falls on execution, service and the people doing the work. The ambitions are large; the vocabulary is often managerial. There are businesses whose romance consists largely of getting the details right.

The details appear in the team’s division of responsibilities. There are wholesale specialists, online arbitrage managers, a private label specialist and staff working on web development. Amir Saleem is listed as co-founder and UAE lead. Ali Imtiaz is identified as the UK team manager. These are useful clues to how Imran’s business approaches distance: it names people responsible for particular work and particular markets.

That structure also makes the business more concrete than the phrase “Amazon agency” suggests. A product researcher and an advertising specialist may work toward the same sale, but they have different problems to solve. Buying suitable stock does not write a persuasive listing. Writing a listing does not replenish inventory. The founder’s task, in such a business, includes making these separate activities add up to a service a customer can actually use.

The shelves behind the screen

Manisofts’ services begin well before an order arrives. The company describes product research, sourcing, listing optimisation, pricing, inventory management and advertising among its activities. It also offers help with account creation and reinstatement. Taken together, those services follow a seller through preparation, operation and the occasional interruption. Online retail has an extensive backstage. Imran has built his company around offering help there.

Its three recurring Amazon business models involve different routes to merchandise. Wholesale starts with sourcing existing products for resale. Online arbitrage involves finding products available at a lower price elsewhere. Private label centres on selling under a seller’s own brand. Manisofts markets services across all three. For Imran, this creates a business with several kinds of customer and several kinds of operational homework.

A 2023 company announcement described asking customers about their businesses, sales goals and possible obstacles. That is a revealing place to begin a consulting relationship. An account can be busy and still have difficulties with stock, advertising or planning. Before proposing the next campaign, someone has to understand which difficulty matters. In this version of entrepreneurship, listening is part of the production process.

Bhakkar gets a place in the account

On March 8, 2023, International Women’s Day, Imran published an article about women in Bhakkar learning to build Amazon businesses through Manisofts. He described training and support covering the selling platform, inventory and customer relationships. The article links those practical skills to financial independence. Here, the local address becomes part of the purpose of the enterprise.

The distinction between selling a service and teaching a skill is worth pausing over. A client may hire an agency because they want work handled on their behalf. A learner needs to understand how to do that work. Imran’s account places both activities inside the same organisation. The store becomes something to operate and something to learn from. Training has a direct relationship to the commercial activity around it.

His founder’s message also describes embracing diversity and gender balance as the workforce expanded. These are his stated priorities, and they fit the subject he chose for that March article. He presents participation in e-commerce as an opportunity people in Bhakkar can acquire through skills and support. The ambition has a particular location and a practical syllabus, which makes it more interesting than a general promise about opportunity.

There is a useful modesty in the actual subjects of that syllabus. Inventory. Customers. A selling platform. None requires a theatrical founder speech to become consequential. A person learning to manage stock is learning a piece of a business. The training Imran describes gives his company’s familiar service vocabulary a second use: the same tasks offered to customers can become capabilities taught to others.

“Leadership by Example, Integrity, and Transparency”

From the values in Imran’s founder’s message

The pleasure, and limits, of a sales number

Imran also communicates in account results. In one LinkedIn post about a Manisofts wholesale account, he reported three-month sales of $117,212.40. He then set out goals for the next three months, six months and year, ending with a $1 million annual sales target. The precision is striking. Even the cents get an appearance. E-commerce promotion can be exuberant, but the decimal point remains wonderfully businesslike.

Those figures belong to his account of a client store. The targets are ambitions. Neither should be confused with Manisofts’ own revenue or Imran’s personal wealth. Read with those distinctions intact, the post shows how he frames progress publicly: a current result, a sequence of future milestones, and a thank-you to the team. The team receives the credit alongside the number.

Another post takes a less celebratory subject: tracking Amazon FBA storage with RevSeller. It promotes a video about monitoring inventory and avoiding storage costs. Placed beside the sales update, it offers a fuller view of his public business persona. There is the attractive number, and there is the housekeeping that surrounds a store. A shelf has to be managed even when the shelf is somewhere else.

A later project description on his LinkedIn profile gives that housekeeping more detail. He reports work on an Amazon brand between July 2024 and January 2025, describing an account audit, revised listings, inventory forecasting and automated advertising tools. The named tools include Quartile, Pacvue and Helium 10. This account of the work is more specific than a general claim to help businesses grow: it identifies decisions about bids, keywords, budgets and stock.

In that case study, Imran reports approximately $3.55 million in ordered sales across seven months and an advertising cost of sales falling from 22 percent to 9.7 percent. These are his reported project results. They illustrate the kind of outcome he chooses to foreground, and the systems he associates with it. His public profile also lists COMSATS Institute of Information Technology in Abbottabad for 2013 to 2017. Between that educational entry and the later project, the recurring professional subject is the operation of online stores.

A founder’s future tense

When Imran turns to the future in his founder’s message, he talks about accelerating the company’s growth strategy and creating positive change in the communities where it operates. Client service and an employee-centred approach sit among the commitments he wants to carry forward. The combination is consistent with the two audiences in his public writing: businesses buying assistance and people building their ability to provide it.

His story therefore has more than one measure of progress. There is the seller’s account, with its orders and stock. There is the agency, with specialists responsible for different functions. And there is the learner, for whom understanding the system is itself a useful result. Imran brings these together under the Manisofts name. Their connection is the work of running an online business, broken down into tasks people can learn and perform.

The date at the beginning gives the story a firm starting point. What follows is a founder’s continuing attempt to organise knowledge: into services, into teams, into instruction. From Bhakkar, Imran has made a business around helping other people sell. His more interesting proposition is that the knowledge required to do it can also be shared with the people around him. Behind the shopping cart, there is room for a classroom.