Global retail is undergoing its most consequential structural transformation in decades. E-commerce sales worldwide are projected to reach $7.4 trillion in 2025, accounting for nearly 24 percent of all global retail spending — up from 18.9 percent in 2022. Mobile devices now account for nearly 80 percent of all retail website visits globally. Unified commerce, where physical and digital retail operations are run on a single integrated platform, is no longer a competitive advantage but an operational prerequisite. Artificial intelligence is reshaping everything from demand forecasting to personalised product recommendations. And the collapse of purely digital direct-to-consumer brands — as customer acquisition costs surge between 25 and 40 percent — is forcing even online-native retailers back toward physical channels and strategic partnerships.
For Bangladesh, these global shifts are not distant developments. They are the operating context within which the country's own retail and e-commerce sector must find its position. Bangladesh's e-commerce market reached nearly $7.5 billion in 2024, growing at a compound annual rate of 11.2 percent between 2020 and 2024, and is projected to reach $9.8 billion by 2028. Yet online retail still accounts for only 3 to 5 percent of total retail spending in the country. That gap — between a fast-growing sector and its still-modest penetration of the broader retail economy — is where the strategic question sits. The global trends playing out in markets a generation ahead of Bangladesh offer a detailed map of what that gap contains, and what it will take to close it.
The Omnichannel Imperative: What International Leaders Have Learned
The most consistent lesson from mature retail markets is that the binary between online and offline retail was always a false choice. Walmart, Target, and other large-format retailers in North America have spent the past decade converting their physical store networks into hybrid assets: fulfillment hubs for online orders, locations for same-day pickup, and service centres that reduce last-mile delivery costs. The data validates the investment. Retailers that achieve mature unified commerce capabilities — where inventory, customer data, and fulfillment processes are managed through a single integrated system — report 27 percent lower fulfillment costs and 18 percent reduced cart abandonment rates. US click-and-collect (buy online, pick up in store) reached $132.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at 16.7 percent annually through 2030.
The broader principle is straightforward but operationally demanding: customers now expect consistency across every touchpoint. Research by AlixPartners surveying 9,000 fashion consumers found that two-thirds of shoppers would leave an e-commerce site or store to shop elsewhere when an item they wished to purchase was out of stock. The same consumers are frustrated when pricing is inconsistent between online and physical channels or when they cannot find in-store what they found online. The research observation that customers are "tired of doing the work" captures the competitive stakes: unified commerce is not a luxury for retail operators who want to retain customers in a high-choice environment.
Bangladesh's retail landscape has its own version of this problem. Daraz — the dominant e-commerce marketplace, owned by Alibaba Group and the single largest technology industry investment in the local market — has built Daraz Express (DEX), one of the country's most advanced logistics networks, capable of delivering to remote districts from Rangpur to Cox's Bazar within days. Chaldal has scaled online grocery through a dark-store model that eliminates intermediate shelf infrastructure. Shajgoj has built trust in beauty and lifestyle categories through content integration and product authentication. These are recognisable iterations of strategies that international players developed over a longer timeline. The question for Bangladesh's growing retailer class — including the thousands of SMEs that now operate online — is how quickly they can internalise the lessons that Western and East Asian retail markets learned through expensive trial and error.
Social Commerce: Bangladesh's Distinctive Structural Advantage
One global trend that Bangladesh has developed independently — and which may represent the sector's most distinctive structural asset — is the scale of social commerce, locally called F-commerce. Bangladesh has over 66 million active social media users, and an estimated 50,000 or more Facebook business pages operate as small retail businesses, many without any presence on formal e-commerce platforms. Research indicates that 78 percent of F-commerce sellers in recent Dhaka-based studies were women — entrepreneurs who found in social media a low-barrier entry point to retail that the formal business registration and logistics infrastructure had not provided them.
This is not unique to Bangladesh by accident. Global data shows that in 2024, more than 110 million people in the US made purchases directly through social channels, and TikTok Shop alone accounted for 75 percent of its dollar sales in health and beauty categories. Social commerce globally is growing because it solves a discovery problem that traditional e-commerce platforms struggle with: it embeds product recommendations within organic social behaviour rather than requiring consumers to initiate a dedicated shopping session. The shift matters. Research shows that 69 percent of consumers now shop while multitasking across social, gaming, and video platforms — the casual, ambient nature of social commerce rather than a focused shopping visit.
Bangladesh's F-commerce ecosystem is thus well-aligned with a global trend, but it operates with significant structural vulnerabilities. Consumer protection mechanisms for F-commerce transactions are weaker than for platform-based purchases. Payment flows often rely on mobile financial services transfers — predominantly bKash — without the escrow-like protections that formal platform checkout systems provide. Return and refund mechanisms are at individual seller discretion. The policy architecture that would formalise this segment of the market — consumer protection standards applicable to social commerce, seller registration requirements, dispute resolution mechanisms — remains incomplete. Formalising F-commerce without killing the informality that made it accessible is one of the more delicate policy design challenges Bangladesh's retail regulators face.
The Payment Infrastructure Gap and Its Retail Consequences
A consistent finding across global retail research is that payment friction is a direct driver of cart abandonment and lost sales. Research shows that 44 percent of consumers abandon their carts due to uncertainty surrounding delivery options, but payment-related friction compounds this problem at checkout. The global standard for leading retail markets is seamless integration between digital payment systems, buy-now-pay-later options, and one-click checkout — infrastructure that reduces decision latency between product selection and completed purchase.
Bangladesh has made genuine progress in this direction. By December 2024, mobile financial services transactions reached 17.37 trillion taka — close to half the country's entire annual economic output, a figure that signals the scale of the MFS infrastructure bKash, Nagad, and Rocket have collectively built. Card-based e-commerce transactions reached approximately Tk 20.35 billion in February 2025, up 23.6 percent year-on-year. The QR-based and interoperable payments roadmap from Bangladesh Bank is gradually reducing the number of steps between wanting to purchase and completing a transaction.
But cash-on-delivery still dominates Bangladesh's e-commerce transaction mix. This is not primarily a preference problem — it reflects rational consumer behaviour given a history of high-profile e-commerce platform failures. Evaly, E-Orange, Alesha Mart, and Dhamaka Shopping collectively destroyed substantial consumer trust through fraudulent or mismanaged operations. Organised platforms like Daraz and Chaldal have responded by introducing stricter seller vetting, clear refund mechanisms, and expanded digital payment options. But rebuilding the trust infrastructure that makes prepayment rational for consumers takes time that is measured in years. The global lesson — that digital payment adoption follows trust, not the other way around — suggests Bangladesh's COD dominance will persist until consumer protection mechanisms are demonstrably effective and consistently enforced.
The Sustainability and Premium Trend: A Longer-Term Signal
Global retail is also registering a structural shift in consumer preferences that Bangladesh retailers should track as an early signal of where middle-class consumer markets move over time. International data shows a 325 percent increase in resale offerings from fashion brands since 2021, with 153 US fashion brands now featuring resale listings on their own e-commerce platforms. Seventy-two percent of consumers in a 2024 survey said resale stigma had decreased in the past year. Nearly half of younger consumers bought secondhand directly from a brand in 2024. Sustainability expectations are becoming embedded in purchasing decisions at a scale that is changing product design, not just marketing.
Bangladesh's position in this trend is complex. The country's garment manufacturing sector is simultaneously a primary producer of the fast fashion that sustainability critiques target and a potential beneficiary of the shift toward traceable, responsibly sourced supply chains that premium international brands increasingly demand. For domestic retail, the sustainability signal has different implications: Bangladesh's emerging middle class — whose consumption patterns are still forming — is more price-sensitive than its counterparts in OECD markets, and the sustainability premium that Western consumers accept is not yet a dominant purchase driver in Bangladesh. But the direction of travel matters. Bangladesh retailers who build product authentication, sourcing transparency, and quality assurance infrastructure now are positioning for consumer preferences that will intensify over the next decade.
Policy Constraints and the Infrastructure Prerequisite
The single largest constraint on Bangladesh's retail sector matching global growth trajectories is not competitive — it is infrastructure and policy. Internet penetration in Bangladesh stood at only 44.5 percent in early 2025, leaving more than half the population effectively outside the addressable market for digital retail. A VAT increase on e-commerce platform commissions from 5 percent to 15 percent has placed a direct burden on SME sellers who operate on thin margins. The absence of a finalised cross-border e-commerce policy prevents consumers from accessing global product assortments and limits the formal customs revenue that such transactions would generate. Logistics infrastructure outside Dhaka — while improving — still constrains same-day or next-day delivery economics for the majority of the country's geography.
The global comparator here is instructive. Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing retail region globally, projected at an 11.73 percent CAGR through 2031, driven by mobile-native commerce adoption, urban density, and middle-class expansion. India's retail sector reached $952 billion in 2024. Southeast Asia's digital economy doubled from $100 billion to over $200 billion between 2020 and 2023. Bangladesh is part of this regional growth story — but only if its policy environment keeps pace with the infrastructure investments that regional peers are making. The Daily Star's analysis of the sector concluded that without addressing gaps in infrastructure, taxation, and regulation, growth will remain constrained — a judgment consistent with what the global data shows about the prerequisites for retail market deepening.
Bangladesh's e-commerce sector supports tens of thousands of jobs directly and is projected to add up to half a million jobs over the next five years. It is providing the infrastructure through which rural SMEs access national markets for the first time. It is building the payment and logistics systems that the next generation of Bangladeshi retail will run on. The global retail trends — omnichannel integration, social commerce, payment infrastructure, sustainability positioning — do not represent external pressures on a reluctant sector. They represent the direction in which Bangladesh's own retail market is already moving, faster in some dimensions than others, and at a scale that makes getting the policy and investment environment right one of the more consequential economic decisions of the next decade.
WinTK covers Bangladesh's business environment, digital economy, and economic policy. For more analysis, explore our news section.
