E-commerce

World is getting smaller every day. The invention of internet changed the way of communication and
business. After CERN introduced world wide web (www) in 1989-1990 the change became more
dramatic. The concept of e-commerce came to reality after that.
E-commerce is the way of buying and selling products or providing services over the internet. In easy
words, doing business over the internet can be called e-commerce. The very first company to establish
e-commerce site based on www was Book Stacks Unlimited in 1992. In 1995 Jeff Bezos formed
amazon.com which is now the world leading e-commerce site. In the same year e-bay was introduced
as the first ever site that provided secure person to person transaction. E-bay also happen to be the
first auction site in history.
Bangladesh witnessed a rapid growth of e-commerce since 2009. But the existence of e-commerce
dates back to 1990s when for Non-Residential-Bangladeshis. These sites were opened as gift sites
mostly. In the period 2000-2008 the growth of e-commerce was really slow. But Bangladesh Bank
opened a new era by allowing online transactions in 2009. SSL COMMERZ became the first
company to receive authorization to perform online task. After that, 2013 was a remarkable year for
E-commerce as BASIS started to focus
on the e-commerce platform. Since then
ajkerdeal.com, akhoni.com (now
bagdoom.com), rokomari.com,
bikroy.com olx.com, daraz.com,
kaymu.com, aliexpress and many other e-
commerce companies started operating in
Bangladesh.
At the end of January 2021, Bangladesh
had almost 113 million internet users
according to Bangladesh
Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC). This shows the ease of access to the internet
and the rapid growth rate behind of our e-commerce sector.
There are few types of e-commerce seen in Bangladesh. These are – Business to Business (B2B)
which takes place between two business entities, Business to Consumer (B2C) which means
transactions between a business entity and a consumer, Consumer to Consumer (C2C) which refers to
transactions between two consumers, Business to Government (B2G). These are the most trending
types of e-commerce in Bangladesh. Example of B2B is bgmea.com, example of B2C is
rokomari.com, example of C2C is bikroy.com. B2G is basically based on e-governance. Among all
these B2C is most popular and trending type of e-commerce. Sites like daraz.com, evaly.com,
priyoshop.com, aliexpress.com, rokomari.com, chaldal.com and so many others are providing services
all over the country.
Current condition of e-commerce in Bangladesh is pretty bright actually. Since the country was hit
with Covid-19 the e-commerce companies saw a drastic rise in sales. As the people could not go out
due to the lockdown people started to rely on the e-commerce sites for necessary items. This covid-19
pandemic even widened the range of products offered by the businesses. Sales went up to 80 percent
than usual. For the past three years, e-commerce sector saw steady a rise of 100 percent according to
E-commerce Association of Bangladesh (E-CAB). German based site Statista predicts that the size of
the market is going to be 3 billion USD within 2023. Experts are also hoping that the market size will
be 5 billion USD within next 5 years. So, we can say that the future of e-commerce is very pleasing.
Moreover, the trend of cashless transaction has the made the business easier for the companies.