I want to be honest with you about something. When I started this project, I didn't sit down and do a formal market analysis. I didn't hire a consultant or commission a research report. I built Manmerce because I had a problem in front of me and I knew how to solve it.
But after I started building, I did look at the numbers. And they surprised me.
The Numbers Are Bigger Than Most People Think
Bangladesh's e-commerce market crossed $3 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2024. That's not a small number. More importantly, it's growing at around 25–30% per year. By 2027, credible estimates put it at $7–9 billion.
There are over 200,000 registered online businesses in Bangladesh right now. Probably another 300,000+ operating through Facebook pages, WhatsApp, and Instagram with no formal website at all. Many of those Facebook-page businesses want to move to a proper store. They just haven't found one that works for them.
If you extend the lens to South and Southeast Asia — Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, and parts of Southeast Asia with similar e-commerce dynamics — you're looking at a combined market of tens of millions of potential store owners and hundreds of millions of online shoppers.
Why International Platforms Keep Missing This Market
It's not malice. It's geometry. When Shopify builds a feature, they're optimising for the median of a global customer base. That median looks like a North American or European small business owner paying with a credit card, shipping through FedEx or UPS, running their store in English.
Building for that median makes complete sense when you're serving 4 million merchants across 175 countries. But it means every feature that matters specifically to us — bKash integration, Bangla language support, COD fraud detection, Steadfast and Pathao courier APIs, mobile OTP login — is either missing, bolted on poorly, or available only through a third-party plugin ecosystem that adds cost and fragility.
WooCommerce's approach — everything via plugins — creates its own problems. A store running 25 different plugins is a store waiting to break. Every plugin is a dependency. Every dependency update is a potential conflict. I've seen perfectly functioning stores go completely offline because two plugins released updates on the same day and they weren't compatible with each other.
The Gap Between "Available" and "Actually Works"
There's a difference between a platform being technically available in a market and being designed for that market. Shopify is available in Bangladesh. You can sign up, build a store, and start selling. But then you hit the wall: your payment gateway isn't supported natively, so you need a third-party integration. Your courier isn't connected, so you need to manually create shipments. Your checkout can't do COD verification, so you have a fraud problem. Your store is in English only, because Bangla support is a plugin that costs extra and doesn't work perfectly.
By the time you've patched all of this together, you're paying more per month than a small team member's salary, and your store still doesn't work the way you need it to.
Why the Solution Has to Come From Inside
I think the next great e-commerce platform for this region will be built by someone who is from this region, has sold in this region, and understands the nuances that only become visible when you live inside the market.
Not because international teams aren't smart — they are, enormously. But because understanding a market deeply enough to build for it is different from understanding it well enough to write a product spec. The details that matter — why COD needs a confirmation call workflow, why Bangla right-to-left text support is non-trivial, why courier fraud patterns look the way they do — are details you absorb from experience, not from research reports.
That's the bet Manmerce is making. That a platform built from the inside, with native understanding of what the market actually needs, will beat a patched-together foreign solution every time.
Next week: I'll tell you exactly what I decided to build — and more importantly, what I decided not to build.
Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.