Explore the rapid growth and challenges of the Bangladeshi e-commerce industry, focusing on market trends, digital transformation, opportunities, and key hurdles in the online retail sector.
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E-commerce in Bangladesh is best understood as two industries sharing one name. The first is the formal marketplace economy: a handful of platforms, led by Alibaba-owned Daraz, alongside grocery specialist Chaldal, bookseller Rokomari, electronics retailer Pickaboo and hundreds of brand webstores. The second, larger and harder to count, is social commerce — hundreds of thousands of sellers who trade through Facebook Pages and Messenger, take orders in chat, and deliver by courier for cash. Together they form a market that the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB) valued at nearly US$7.5 billion in 2024, yet which still accounts for only about 3 to 5 per cent of all retail sales in the country.
The foundations are strong for a market at this stage: the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) counted 131.49 million internet subscriptions in October 2025, alongside 187.46 million mobile subscriptions, and almost every online shopper has a mobile financial services account such as bKash or Nagad. What Bangladesh built more slowly was trust — as the advance-payment scandals of 2021, the defining event of the industry's short history, showed.
Online selling in Bangladesh began in the early 2010s, as cheap smartphones, expanding 3G coverage and Facebook's rapid adoption created the first mass online audience. The trade body e-CAB was founded in 2014 to represent the new sector, and the government's National Digital Commerce Policy followed in 2018. Two platform launches from this period still shape the market. In Dhaka, Chaldal was founded in 2013 by Waseem Alim, Tejas Viswanath and Zia Ashraf as an online grocery delivery service — a deliberately narrow bet on daily necessities in one of the world's densest cities, which later took the company through the Y Combinator accelerator in 2015. The general marketplace arrived a year later: Daraz, founded in Pakistan in 2012 by the German venture builder Rocket Internet, began operations in Bangladesh in 2014 and launched officially in February 2015.
The decisive corporate event came in May 2018, when Alibaba Group acquired the entire Daraz Group from Rocket Internet for an undisclosed sum. Daraz Bangladesh became part of the Chinese group's South Asian arm, gained access to Alibaba's logistics and technology playbook, and in 2018 ran its first 11.11 sale, modelled on Singles' Day. Alibaba later bought the food-delivery pioneer HungryNaki, launched in 2013, through Daraz in March 2021. Around these anchors, a local ecosystem filled in: Rokomari built the online book trade, Pickaboo and others specialised in electronics and gadgets, and courier and fulfilment startups — among them firms linked to the wider logistics economy that also includes freight platforms such as Truck Lagbe — made nationwide delivery routine.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21 then compressed years of adoption into months. Lockdowns pushed groceries, medicine and Eid shopping online, daily deliveries surged, and — fatefully — a group of discount platforms discovered that advance payments from new customers could fund implausibly cheap offers to earlier ones. The boom and the fraud grew together, and both peaked in 2021.
There is no single official measure of Bangladeshi e-commerce, and published figures vary because they count different things — marketplace sales alone, or marketplace plus social commerce, grocery delivery and services. Presented with attribution, the estimates form a consistent range. Md Sayed Ali, e-CAB's administrator, wrote in The Daily Star in August 2025 that the market was worth approximately US$6.9 billion in 2023 and nearly US$7.5 billion in 2024, with a projection of US$9.8 billion by 2028. A commercial B2C databook published by Research and Markets in January 2026 put the 2024 market at US$6.84 billion, expected US$7.41 billion in 2025 and about US$9.65 billion by 2029, after compound annual growth of 11.2 per cent between 2020 and 2024. In taka terms, e-CAB's executive director told the Financial Express in July 2024 that the market stood at Tk 450 billion and was heading for Tk 500 billion by the end of that year, with about one million deliveries a day across the country. Narrower definitions that exclude much informal social commerce produce lower totals — around US$5 billion in e-CAB-linked writing in early 2026, which also credited the sector with direct and indirect employment for nearly 1.5 million people.
Three structural facts matter more than any headline total. Online sales are still only about 3 to 5 per cent of total retail; almost all sales are domestic, with cross-border e-commerce estimated at only about US$0.5 billion in early 2026; and demand is sharply seasonal, spiking around Eid, Puja and campaign events such as Daraz's 11.11, with fashion, electronics, groceries and beauty products leading online baskets.
Daraz remains the market's centre of gravity. At the time of its February 2024 restructuring, The Daily Star described it as the market leader with about 50,000 sellers and an average of 100,000 daily orders, operating its own logistics arm, Daraz Express, and the country's largest e-commerce warehousing network. Its recent history, however, has been one of contraction toward profitability, covered below. Chaldal is the leading grocery platform, built on its own warehouses and dark stores — the model it pioneered helped it raise about US$40 million in total, including a US$10 million Series C in September 2021 — but in 2025–26 it hit a liquidity crisis: salary difficulties from August 2025, protests by Jashore staff in March 2026 over months of unpaid wages, a reported Tk 40 crore working-capital shortfall, a workforce cut from 3,300 to 2,200, and a request for Tk 40 crore in emergency bridge financing, even while still generating about Tk 40 crore in monthly sales. Rokomari dominates online bookselling, a category with deep cultural reach that extends to the Ekushey Book Fair season. Pickaboo leads in branded electronics. Around them sits a long tail: brand-owned webstores, pharmacy and healthcare platforms, travel and ticketing sites, and classifieds — plus the social-commerce sellers who, in aggregate, rival the formal platforms.
Competition also comes from outside the marketplace model: payment apps have added shopping storefronts, supermarkets run their own delivery, and global platforms ship through resellers and buying agents without a formal local presence. No reputable report as of late 2026 confirms a formal Bangladesh launch by Temu or Shein; their pressure is felt indirectly, through ultra-cheap cross-border parcels and the price expectations they set.
If Daraz is the visible tip of Bangladeshi e-commerce, Facebook is its submerged mass. "F-commerce" — selling through a Facebook Page, negotiating in Messenger, and delivering by courier — requires no website, no company registration to start, and almost no capital, which is why it became the default first business for students, homemakers and small manufacturers. The counts are estimates and should be read as such. e-CAB, quoted by The Business Standard in July 2024, put the total number of Bangladeshi business Pages on Facebook at more than 500,000, with 200,000 to 250,000 Pages run by f-commerce entrepreneurs and about 60,000 of them making regular sales — against only about 3,000 paid e-CAB members. A BTRC official's much lower 2022 figure of nearly 50,000 selling Pages shows how sharply the total depends on what is counted. What is not disputed is the social shape of the sector: a large share of f-commerce sellers are women, many running their businesses from home, and the sector's informality is both its strength and its weakness — sellers can start in a day, but they trade without consumer-protection cover, formal credit or, usually, registration. The government's Digital Business ID system was meant to close that gap, yet by March 2026 only 2,136 businesses had been certified out of 13,541 applications.
None of this trade moves without couriers. A competitive last-mile industry — national couriers and e-commerce specialists offering next-day delivery in Dhaka and two-to-three-day delivery nationwide, cash collection, and returns handling — is the sector's true infrastructure, though a fragile one: Paperfly, once a leading courier, stopped taking orders in autumn 2023 after promised investment failed to arrive. Logistics is also the main cost centre: failed deliveries and refused parcels, known as returns-to-origin, are charged back to sellers, and for cash-on-delivery orders a refusal is simultaneously a lost sale, a lost delivery fee and a lost return fee.
The crisis that redefined the industry arrived in 2021. A cluster of platforms — Evaly, E-Orange, Dhamaka Shopping, Qcoom, Alesha Mart and others — had built explosive growth on a simple, unsustainable offer: branded goods, especially motorcycles and electronics, at discounts of up to half price or more, paid for in advance, with delivery promised weeks later. In substance, early customers were paid for with later customers' money. When delivery delays stretched into months, the structure collapsed in public.
Evaly, launched on 16 December 2018, was the largest case. In its own report to the Commerce Ministry, the company put its liabilities at Tk 543 crore, including Tk 311 crore owed to customers; a Bangladesh Bank examination reported liabilities of about Tk 404 crore against assets of only about Tk 92 crore. Founder-CEO Mohammad Rassel and his wife, chairperson Shamima Nasrin, were arrested on 16 September 2021 after customers filed cases. E-Orange followed a similar arc: its owners, Sonia Mahjabin and her husband, were jailed in August 2021, and investigators alleged that about Tk 1,100 crore in customer advances had been taken without delivering goods; the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit later reported Tk 22.21 billion transacted through E-Orange and Red Orange accounts between January 2019 and September 2021. The scandal widened to the payment layer itself, when the BFIU asked police to act over allegations that about Tk 1,300 crore had been siphoned through Foster Payments, a gateway used by several of the collapsed platforms; Bangladesh Bank suspended Foster's transactions.
The regulatory response was swift and structural. The Commerce Ministry finalised the Digital Commerce Operational Guidelines on 30 June 2021 (gazetted on 4 July): products paid for in advance had to be handed to couriers within 48 hours and delivered within five days in the same city, and sellers could take more than a 10 per cent advance only for ready-to-ship goods — unless payment went through escrow. On the same date, 30 June 2021, Bangladesh Bank introduced the escrow service: for advance-paid orders, the payment gateway holds the customer's money and releases it to the seller only after delivery is confirmed. A Central Digital Commerce Cell was set up to oversee refunds. The clean-up was slow and partial: by October 2025, the cell had detected Tk 534 crore inside the escrow system and refunded Tk 476.02 crore to 95,923 customers, with about Tk 58 crore still stuck — while money taken before escrow existed, outside any gateway, largely could not be traced or recovered at all. Thousands of customers of the collapsed platforms are still pursuing cases years later.
The lasting effect was a trust shock. Advance payment — normal everywhere else in the world's e-commerce — became suspect in Bangladesh, pushing the market even further toward cash on delivery and slowing the growth of honest prepaid businesses along with the fraudulent ones.
Payment is where Bangladeshi e-commerce most differs from global norms. Cash on delivery has historically accounted for the overwhelming majority of orders: an ADB/UNESCAP assessment put the Bangladeshi share at about 90 per cent in the late 2010s, platform-era reporting commonly cited around 85 per cent, and more recent industry estimates range from 60 to 80 per cent depending on the category — lower for travel and digital services, higher for fashion and social commerce. Every account agrees on the direction of travel (slowly down) and on COD's continued majority.
The alternatives are not lacking. Card-based e-commerce transactions reached about Tk 20.35 billion in February 2025, up 23.6 per cent year on year, according to Bangladesh Bank data reported by The Daily Star — real growth, but from a small base. Mobile financial services are the natural bridge: bKash and Nagad accounts are near-universal among online shoppers, gateways such as SSLCommerz aggregate cards, banking and MFS, and "digital payment on delivery" options let customers pay the courier by phone instead of cash. On the most formal platform the shift is measurable: Daraz's chief commercial officer wrote in September 2026 that digital payments made up 30 to 35 per cent of its transactions on regular days and 40 to 50 per cent during major campaigns — still leaving cash the majority everywhere, and the overwhelming majority in social commerce. After 2021, paying only when the parcel is in hand feels, to many shoppers, like the only safe way to buy.
Beyond trust and payment, the industry faces familiar emerging-market constraints. Logistics outside the main cities remains slow and expensive relative to order values, and cold-chain capacity is thin. Formal sellers complain of competing against informal sellers who carry no tax or compliance costs; informal sellers reply that platform, courier and payment fees consume margins they cannot raise prices to cover. Finance is scarce for asset-light online businesses, and rising social-media advertising costs squeeze the f-commerce model that depends on cheap reach. The macroeconomic squeeze of 2023–26 cut discretionary spending and forced the platform cost-cutting described below.
The formal market's leader illustrates the correction. Daraz cut about 11 per cent of its group workforce in February 2023; a further round in February 2024 reportedly affected about 35 per cent of its roughly 900 full-time Bangladesh staff; and in mid-2026 it reportedly laid off about 100 more employees and closed 16 of its 100 delivery hubs — prompting shutdown rumours that Daraz publicly denied in June 2026, insisting it remained committed to Bangladesh. Grocery and essentials — the least discretionary categories — continue to grow through the downturn, even as Chaldal's crisis shows how thin the sector's funding has become.
The outlook, on the industry's own numbers, is for a market of roughly US$9.7 to US$9.8 billion by 2028–29, online penetration rising from today's 3 to 5 per cent of retail, and cross-border e-commerce — about US$0.5 billion in 2026 — identified by e-CAB as the largest untapped prize. Regulation is moving that way: a draft Cross-Border Digital Commerce Policy published in July 2026 would require foreign platforms to register for a Digital Business ID, keep a local presence and comply with tax rules, and route cross-border orders through a Bangladesh Bank-supervised central escrow. What 2021 settled is the industry's centre of gravity: Bangladeshi e-commerce no longer grows on impossible discounts, but on groceries delivered in an hour, books delivered to a district town, and a Facebook seller whose courier collects cash at a customer's door.
