What it took to make Bangladesh click ‘Add to Cart’

Remember when clicking "Add to Cart" felt like a small risk? You would look at the product photo a few times and wonder - will it actually arrive? Will it look anything like the picture? Will the seller send the right thing? And after paying, there was always one more thought lurking. Okay, now what?

It is hard to imagine that feeling today. We order a phone, a pair of shoes, groceries or household essentials in a few taps. But Bangladesh did not arrive here overnight. Technology played a role. So did payments, logistics and connectivity. Mostly, though, it took years to build confidence on both sides of the marketplace, the buyer and the seller.

Bangladesh's e-commerce story is often traced back to January 2000, when Munshigi.com launched as the country's first e-commerce platform, taking cash-on-delivery orders for gifts. The idea was simple, browse from home and have something arrive at your door.

But internet access was limited, online payments barely existed, and there was no delivery network built for this kind of shopping. The real question back then wasn't whether people wanted to shop this way. It was whether something seen on a screen could actually become a package on the doorstep.

That question took a long time to answer fully. Even today, industry estimates put Bangladesh's e-commerce market in the range of $6 billion to $7 billion, still a small slice of total retail spending, though growing steadily year over year. The opportunity, in other words, was never really in doubt. What was missing was the infrastructure.

Having spent more than 15 years across e-commerce and telecom, I have watched that infrastructure get built from close range. What stands out to me is that the hardest part was rarely getting people to visit a website. The harder task was making the experience consistent enough that people would trust it, use it again, and eventually stop thinking about it at all.

When Daraz started in Bangladesh, the platform had around 150 sellers. Today there are more than 50,000, with delivery reaching all 64 districts. Those numbers matter less as milestones than as signs of how much of the underlying ecosystem had to be built alongside them, sellers who needed tools, customers who needed reasons to trust, delivery routes that simply did not exist before.

Large-scale shopping campaigns have played an important role in accelerating e-commerce adoption, bringing new consumers onto digital platforms and creating opportunities for businesses to participate in online retail.

However, the long-term development of the industry depends on what happens beyond these campaign periods. Sustainable growth requires customers to return because they can consistently find the products they need, at competitive prices, supported by reliable delivery and customer service.

The industry's transition from acquiring first-time shoppers to building long-term customer relationships represents an important stage in its maturity.

Trust sits right underneath that. A customer returns when the product arrives on time and matches what they ordered, and when they know there's a clear path if it does not. Over the years we have had to treat that almost as an operations problem as much as a branding one.

Delivery time across most of Bangladesh has come down from around five days to under three. Our return rate now sits below 1% of total orders. Numbers like these are not just internal metrics, they are a rough proxy for how much uncertainty we have managed to take out of the process, one order at a time.

Logistics mattered here in a very specific way, because Bangladesh was never only a Dhaka market. Fast Delivery, for instance, launched covering nearly 50,000 products from more than 2,500 sellers, and has kept expanding since.

More than half of Daraz's buyers today are outside Dhaka, which tells me where the next phase of growth actually sits. It is not only about going deeper into cities that already shop online. It is about connecting businesses and customers across the rest of the country, which will take better regional logistics, more accessible payments, and more local businesses willing to go digital in the first place.

Expanding e-commerce also means enabling businesses to participate meaningfully in the digital economy. For smaller enterprises, establishing an online presence is only the first step. Sustained growth requires capabilities in inventory management, digital merchandising, customer engagement and demand forecasting.

Through initiatives such as Daraz University, which trains approximately 5,000 sellers each month, we are working to strengthen these capabilities and help local businesses reach customers beyond their traditional markets.

Payments followed a similar arc. Digital payments now make up around 30 -35% of transactions on Daraz Bangladesh on a regular day, climbing to somewhere between 40% and 50% during major campaigns, a shift that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago. As people grow comfortable paying digitally for everyday things, a lot of the remaining friction around online shopping simply falls away on its own.

The next shift will likely come through AI and data, not just in how products get recommended, but in how sellers manage inventory, price competitively and understand demand without needing a large team to do it. For smaller businesses especially, that could mean access to capabilities that used to belong only to bigger players.

Looking back, Bangladesh's e-commerce industry had to solve one problem before it could move to the next. First, proving that a package would actually arrive. Then, making payments and service reliable enough to trust. Now, the work is about turning a first purchase into a habit, and extending that habit well beyond the biggest cities.

The writer is the Chief Commercial Officer of Daraz Bangladesh.