People between 25 and 34 years shop the most from the local e-commerce sites, a recent study found.
The 35-44 and 18-24 age brackets take up the second and third places, according to the study by Kaymu Bangladesh.
“In Bangladesh, e-commerce is growing faster and we hope this market will find a strong position in world perspective also after USA, China and India,” said Quazi Zulquarnain, Kaymu Bangladesh’s deputy managing director.
This segment of trade will grow faster once all parts of the country come under 3G coverage and the mobile internet speed picks up.
The study gives a detailed insight into the consumer behaviour and their approach to online shopping.
Kaymu is an online marketplace that began operations in Bangladesh in January 2014. It offers an array of products including clothing, footwear, mobile phones, computers, jewelleries, watches, electronics, books, and food and beverages. Mobile phones and electronics are clearly the most popular items.
Every day 20,000 to 25,000 users visit the site, with 35 percent of the e-commerce traffic coming from Dhaka, followed by Chittagong at 29 percent and Gazipur 15 percent.
Dhaka is the right place for growing e-commerce because of traffic jam and some other issues, he said.
Cash-on-delivery is the most commonly used payment method in Bangladesh, accounting for 95 percent of e-commerce transactions. Only 1 percent used credit cards, about 2 percent bKash or other mobile transactions and 2 percent banking channels.
The reason for the overwhelming preference for the cash-on-delivery method is that the country’s e-commerce landscape is still in its very early stages. All developing markets went through this phase, said AKM Fahim Mashroor, convener of BASIS e-Commerce Alliance.
Even a couple of years ago, cash-on-delivery dominated India’s e-commerce transactions, he said, adding its usage dropped to about 60 percent recently.
However, Bangladesh is in a very good position as mobile banking systems are flourishing here, said Mashroor, a past president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services.
Mashroor is optimistic that within four to five years the country’s mobile banking system will develop more and account for a greater share of the online transactions.
Of the total e-commerce activities carried out, 83 percent comprised of males.
About 71 percent of the online purchases were made from desktops and 26 percent and 3 percent from mobile phones and tablets respectively.
Kaymu predicts that the Bangladeshi e-commerce market will achieve 72 percent growth in the near future.
“This is a Tk 150 crore market and it will grow faster than anyone can imagine,” Zulquarnain said.
Kaymu, which is backed by Rocket Internet, saw 400 percent growth in the last one and a half years and now has 10,000 registered sellers and 100,000 different products on its website. There are 4.88 crore internet users in Bangladesh.