Demographic and business trends in the Bangladesh e-commerce sector are also noteworthy, as revealed by a recent report published by Kaymu, another up-and coming e-commerce portal:
Future Growth Areas
There are other significant drivers of growth of e-commerce of Bangladesh, which are expected to play a more major role in the next 5-10 years, according to the study on e-commerce in Bangladesh published by the Centre for Enterprise and Society at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.
Most of these drivers are applications and services being conceptualized and implemented by the financial services sector and the telecommunications sector. Notable among them are e-banking, mobile financial services, mobile agricultural services, rural e-commerce, and f-commerce.
E-banking has begun to gain traction in Bangladesh as more users gain comfort in banking through online portals, allowing banks to cut costs on their services.
Customer satisfaction and future growth of e-banking depend primarily on assurance, visibility and responsiveness of e-banking ortals.
However, for increased adoption rates, security of payment continues to be an important consideration. Ease of operability, security and status are the key drivers for adoption of Internet banking while accessibility, time and cost are also important factors.
According to industry experts, frequent use of credit cards for online payments is correlated with the use of e-banking portals by citizens, pointing to further growth opportunities in this area.
Although there is much hype with regard to mobile financial services (MFS), and tangible business growth to justify the hype, for service providers such as bKash and Dutch-Bangla Mobile, there are several products offered by MFS providers that are yet to grain traction. As for now, the most popular uses of mobile financial services include:
However, MFS products such as deposit schemes and loans are still not popular among users and this is expected to change in the coming years. User openness to these services is also correlated to their overall financial literacy, according to industry experts interviewed for this report.
Mobile agricultural services are also expected to play a larger role in the lives and livelihood of farmers and agricultural sector workers in Bangladesh. As it stands, telecommunications service providers such as Robi, Banglalink and Grameenphone have services related to agriculture market information, news and weather updates.
However, penetration is quite low at present, and as of 2012, it was only 1%. It is also envisioned that for critical issues such as disaster preparedness and disaster response management, call-data records may provide useful information to telecommunication companies. Information may also be gleaned with regard to rural or remote population displacement, while top- up frequency after disasters can reflect financial status after a disaster (by enabling comparison between pre- and post-disaster top-up trends). Thus agriculture-related services are expected to grow in popularity and scope in the future, and gradually connect to online portals of information and feedback on smart phones. A related driver for this is the popularity and penetration of smart phones, which continues to increase as cost of manufacturing these phones go down.
Facebook has become a pervasive metaphor for the demographic dividend in Bangladesh and its concomitant potential. Facebook has seen several important social and business applications. Social applications have ranged from coordinated movements of certain sections of the citizenry, buoyed by different causes and motives, while on the commercial side, several retailers have either used Facebook as a platform for sales effectively, transitioned their entire business to Facebook, or from the outset, used Facebook as the primary mode of communication with customers.
Businesses such as Style World initiated their journey through Facebook and Shoptobd later moved to designated webpages. With 25% penetration among the citizenry and contributing to majority of the Internet traffic, the potential for F-commerce remains quite significant.
This report was first published by the Centre for Enterprise and Society at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.
