Md Sajedur Rahman is a Director of Star Tech Ltd, where he has helped the company build its e-commerce business from scratch into the dominant player in the IT products e-commerce vertical in Bangladesh.
Mr. Sajed, a software engineer by training, joined Star Tech in 2017. At that time, Star Tech had an almost non-existent e-commerce operation run by a team of a total of two people: one uploading products to its website and another replying to Facebook messages, both working out of a small room inside a warehouse at the company’s multi-plan center outlet.
After joining the company, Sajed developed all aspects of its strategic e-commerce plan. He combined Star Tech's existing expertise in sales, marketing, technology, and management to deliver a superior brand and shopping experience to its customers online.
Often, when large and successful companies enter a new market, particularly in tech, they stumble. One way of looking at the challenge is through the idea of the innovator's dilemma. I have written and talked about the phenomenon quite a bit. I have seen it many times in the broader tech industry in Bangladesh. I have seen it happen in e-commerce as well, several times, where large, successful companies started an e-commerce business only to find themselves in a difficult position. To that end, Star Tech is quite an anomaly. The company has not only built a dominant e-commerce business, but it has built an e-commerce platform that has quietly become a research and reference point for customers when they deliberate on their tech and IT products purchasing. That’s not a small feat, and I always wanted to understand how Star Tech has managed to do it.
In this interview with Mr. Sajed, we wanted to do exactly that—understand how Star Tech has built a dominant e-commerce business and how it navigated the challenges of the innovator’s dilemma. We talked about the early days of Star Tech’s e-commerce operation, the evolution of the business, strategies that worked, the state of its operation today, operational dynamics, and future plans. We also discussed how Mr. Sajed operates, stays productive, and leads.
Most large companies, as well as many small ones, want to start with ambitious and expensive goals. For instance, when many large companies in Dhaka wanted to enter e-commerce, they did so with great fanfare, only to discontinue or deprioritize the business just as quickly. I asked Mr. Sajed what Star Tech did differently. His answer: start small and play the long game. When he started building out the Star Tech e-commerce business, he decided to go slow and planned for a long game. He focused on growing traffic and building the authority of Star Tech’s e-commerce website instead of pushing for immediate sales, which weren't happening anyway. He kept the cost low so that management remained patient. This approach allowed him to calibrate the operation accordingly and grow the operation along with traction. I think a lot of companies would benefit from adopting a similar strategy when entering a new market.
Throughout the interview, we discussed a ton of similar strategic insights in great detail. If you are an entrepreneur or an operator, this is a must-read.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I think a good place to start this conversation would be talking about the background and journey. Please briefly tell us about yourself and your path to what you are doing today.
Md Sajedur Rahman: I studied Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Asia Pacific. I had a great passion for programming, and I was reasonably good at it. We used to participate in programming contests like NCPC and ICPC to represent the university, and I represented my university in several NCPC and ICPC events.
My career started towards the end of my graduation, which means I didn't get much of a break after finishing my studies. Before my thesis was completed, I received an offer from a good company called Bit Mascot Private Limited. I joined them before my thesis was finished. The opportunity came through a few seniors of mine who were working at the company at that time. They referred me for the job. So I ended up joining the company.
While I worked on several projects there, I spent a long time on one project called Web Commander. Web Commander was an e-commerce CMS, a product of the Australian company Web Alive. They consider Shopify and BigCommerce as their competitors. Web Commander is being built to that standard. It is still running and has quite a few users in Australia. I worked on that e-commerce platform/CMS for a long time, developing features and improving them based on client requirements.
The experience gave me opportunities to interact with many e-commerce clients and understand what makes a good ecommerce platform. It also helped me understand the e-commerce market abroad, which was booming at the time.
Ruhul: What year are you talking about?
Sajed: I started at Bit Mascot in October 2013. At that time, e-commerce wasn't popular in Bangladesh. But I could sense that it would become popular in the coming years.
The founders of Star Tech are my two older brothers and their friends. They always asked me to join the company, asking why I worked elsewhere.
In the beginning, I told them I wasn't interested in business. I loved programming and wanted to do it. I felt there was nothing for me to do at Star Tech. However, they constantly counseled me, and my parents also encouraged me to join my brothers' established business instead of working somewhere else.
Around 2017, I realized I could contribute something at Star Tech. So I willingly told my brothers that I wanted to join. I could do something if I joined the company. My brothers happily included me. I gave a presentation to the Board of Directors about my plans. I had a good understanding of e-commerce, how it works, and its technical and operational nitty-gritties. I had spent four years working on building a platform, a CSM. I was not a user of the platform. I was working on building the platform. I was working on the CMS itself, not using the CMS to develop ecommerce sites. I had a certain depth in my technical understanding of things.
Around 2017, I spoke with my brothers, who willingly accepted my proposal, and I joined Star Tech to build the ecommerce business.
At that time, Star Tech had a web team of only two or three people. They worked out of a small workstation inside a warehouse in the Multiplan Center. One person uploaded products to the website. The other managed Facebook queries. After joining, I saw that the office was in a terrible state. We decided to move to a small office in Taltola.
To start e-commerce, you always have to think long-term. Short-term returns are not possible. Many companies tried to grow too quickly using massive offers but failed. If someone asks me how to succeed in e-commerce, I emphasize that you must focus on three core things.
Ruhul: You had a customer service center in Taltola?
Sajid Bhai: Yes, we had a service center in Taltola. My team started working out of a small room on the third floor of that building.
We started small, working step by step. We never had huge targets. We grew by setting small, achievable goals. It would be untrue to claim I knew Star Tech ecommerce would reach this level from the beginning.
Our initial target was building a good, SEO-friendly platform. When I was at Bit Mascot, they had an excellent SEO team. I had a good relationship with two members of the SEO team, Liakat and Ruiat Bhai. We hired them as part-time SEO consultants for our ecommerce around 2017.
At that time, not many people in the IT market in Bangladesh understood the power of SEO. People didn’t know much about how to use SEO for free marketing and traffic generation.
After doing some work on SEO, we quickly managed to generate significant traffic. When we started, Star Tech's website had only 500 to 1,000 daily visitors. Within the first year, by the grace of Allah, we reached 10,000 daily traffic.
In the first few years, our main goal was to grow website traffic alongside generating some orders. The company already had a structure and a growing business. Our retail business was doing well. So, ecommerce, as a small operation, didn't have much pressure to generate huge orders on day one. The company was happy with the marketing and branding benefits we were generating. We were also generating decent orders. Our main target was growing the traffic on the website, even prioritizing it over sales.
Through this focus on traffic, we quickly became number one in the IT product market for most keywords. This ranking provided many benefits, such as free branding, increased the company’s retail sales, and significantly increased the company’s popularity.
Star Tech was already a popular company around 2017. However, it was not as well-known as it is today. Our online traffic started to help in building that awareness, converting many online visitors into retail customers.
When people searched for "laptop pricing Bangladesh" or "motherboard," Star Tech came number one. We gained this brand visibility for free, without running Facebook or PPC (Pay Per Click) ads.
That's how we got started slowly.
With growing traffic, our ecommerce sales also started slowly. I clearly remember the day we generated 10 orders—we celebrated that achievement.
We worked step-by-step with small targets: first 10 orders, then 20, etc. That's how we have come here today.
In the first few years, our main goal was to grow website traffic alongside generating some orders. The company already had a structure and a growing business. Our retail business was doing well. So, ecommerce, as a small operation, didn't have much pressure to generate huge orders on day one.
Ruhul: Can you expand on this journey and provide more details? It would be useful for our readers, because many people here don't understand the strategic thinking and long-term investment required to grow a digital or e-commerce platform.
Sajed: To start e-commerce, you always have to think long-term. Short-term returns are not possible. Many companies tried to grow too quickly using massive offers but failed.
If someone asks me how to succeed in e-commerce, I emphasize that you must focus on three core things.
First, provide good quality products. You must sell authentic products.
Second, hassle-free service. The service you provide is crucial. Focus on providing a reliable service.
Finally, content. Content creation is a very important part of ecommerce. How are you showing the product to the customers? How are you communicating your products to customers?
Customers can touch and feel a product in a retail shop before making a purchase. It helps him/her to understand the quality of a product. How do you communicate that quality sense online? That's where content comes to play.
The content you publish on social media and on your website is how customers gauge the product quality, as they can't touch and feel the product online like in a retail shop.
When you provide helpful content that explains your products and services well, your customers can get a sense of the quality of the product. It helps build trust. So good product quality, hassle-free service, and excellent content are the foundation.
Another essential factor is competitive pricing. Without competitive pricing, it's difficult to succeed in e-commerce, especially because customers can easily search for prices.
The internet is democratic and empowering for customers. People can now easily search and compare prices between different websites. As an ecommerce website, there is nothing special we offer on the product end. If someone buys a watch from Star Tech, he doesn't get a different product than if they buy the same product from some other ecommerce site. I can’t claim my watch is better than other sellers' because I don’t make the product. I merely sell it.
A customer doesn't have any incentive to buy it from me over any other seller if I only promise an authentic product. Ten other online shops are promising the same thing. We must offer something special so that he chooses me over other sellers.
So what can we offer?
First, we offer price benefits compared to competitors. Second, we offer good service.
Now, service means two different things. It includes pre-sale service and after-sale service. Pre-sales service is how quickly the order is confirmed and delivered. How smooth the entire process is, and how smooth the order-placing process on your website, and so on.
For IT products, warranties are normal. The key after-sales service is how hassle-free the warranty, return, and refund policies are for the customer. These things play an important role.
These are basic things in ecommerce.
If a customer tells me the product they bought from us is good, I don't take the credit. I say the credit belongs to the manufacturer. I didn't make the product.
What is important to me is the service they received from us. I can’t take credit for a good product because it might fail tomorrow. A smartwatch might not work as you expected. My credit is only if I provide excellent service when the product breaks down, such as quickly replacing it.
The internet is democratic and empowering for customers. People can now easily search and compare prices between different websites.
Ruhul: That's very interesting. You started in 2017 with a team of only two people, moved to Taltola, hired consultants for SEO, set small targets, executed on them, grew patiently year on year, and now you are one of the largest IT products e-commerce platforms in Bangladesh. Many people even use Star Tech’s website for product research before purchase, even if they buy offline. Can you talk about this evolution at different junctures of your journey? For instance, 2017 was the foundation. You probably expanded a bit in 2018. Then, in 2020 (during COVID), you realized e-commerce could significantly contribute to revenue and become a strong pillar of the company. In between, there were challenges, stories, and strategic decisions. Tell us more about this evolution and journey. What were the strategic decisions and challenges during that slow evolution?
Sajed: Our entire journey is a story of necessity. We did things as we needed to do them. From the beginning, we tried to build a user-friendly, SEO friendly platform. I'm a programmer myself. I have always thought like a programmer. I never thought like a businessman.
I could see that building a platform from scratch would require a long time, a big team, and a massive investment, which wasn't possible. Our first goal was an SEO-friendly platform. So we forked OpenCart and started developing on the code base of OpenCart. We named our new platform Star Cart. OpenCart was not SEO-friendly, had performance issues, and lacked the necessary features that we wanted.
We continuously developed Star Cart based on our needs. Now, only about 30% of the original OpenCart code remains—we have fully revised and changed the engine and developed it based on our needs.
Our primary goal was always a fast website. You might have noticed that the Star Tech website has always been very fast. We understood from the beginning that if customers are not happy using my website, they wouldn't return after their first use.
We also paid a lot of attention to UI/UX. My previous experience of working at a software development company helped me a lot both in understanding these aspects and in finding people who could help us. I had a strong network there and knew a lot of people who were doing world-class work. Good UI/UX greatly benefited us. My former colleague Dipu Bhai from Bit Mascot, who was accustomed to international standard work, handled our initial UI/UX. We hired six to eight people from the Bit Mascot team part-time—for UI/UX, development, and SEO—to build the platform.
We are still building the problem. We have a small development team. I still code myself. I spend two to three hours daily coding and reviewing code. Our focus was on creating a fast website that customers enjoyed using.
The first couple of years were spent building the platform. By the time Covid-19 hit, we had already set up the ecommerce operation and were relatively ready to take on the challenges of growth.
Ruhul: You also needed to set up the entire ecommerce operation. The website was only one part of it. You need to figure out logistics, customer service, returns and refunds, and many other things. Can you tell us more about those aspects?
Sajed: We started small. I hired a hotline agent, a delivery person, and one person for operations. As I said, everything we did, we did when we needed to do. We hired these people when we needed them. We started on a small scale.
We had a two-person team from the beginning for Facebook management and product uploading. People who reply on Facebook, we call them customer support. For people who upload products on the website, we created a new department called Web and SEO. We structured departments around the initial tasks performed by the two original employees (Facebook reply and product upload).
We then created a department for Hotline (now Customer Support) and another for Operations. We had four employees and divided them into four teams. Our teams are still divided into these four teams.
We have a team called Web and SEO. We have a customer support team. We have an operations team, a media team, and a software Team, totaling five teams now.
We started with four employees across four teams. We had the structure from the beginning, but the number of people was small.
The operations team initially had one delivery man and one person for billing and product collection. We scaled the team only when demand increased. When our orders increased and one hotline agent couldn’t handle the load, we hired more team members. Gradually, as the business grew, our team also grew accordingly.
Currently, our e-commerce team, including delivery staff, has around 60 to 70 people.
Whatever we have achieved is the blessing of the Almighty. We didn't do anything out of the ordinary.
Ruhul: What were the initial challenges?
Sajed: The biggest challenge initially, and still today, is operations management. The real work, the e-commerce operation, begins after an order is confirmed.
We manage a huge inventory of about 10,000 SKUs. It is impossible to stock one piece of every product in the e-commerce warehouse due to the massive cost. We only stock fast-moving products. However, customers often order rare or slow-moving products. When they cannot find a product anywhere else, they order online. In aggregate, this number can be significant.
This still happens. It was more so in the early days. People couldn't find something offline, so they searched for it online, found it on Star Tech, and placed an order. Now, we may not have the product in our stock. Probably we had it a long time ago and don't have it now.
Sometimes, a product might be available in our Rangpur branch. We have to bring it from Rangpur and then send it to the customer. It could be that the customer ordered the product from Rangpur. Since we don't have an operation team there, the product must be collected from Rangpur, brought to our central warehouse for packaging, and then sent back to Rangpur for delivery.
Ruhul: How does your logistics work? As I can understand, you don't use a hyper-local logistics model despite having many retail outlets?
Sajed: Our main operation happens centrally from our large warehouse in Hazaribagh. We have a large team that looks after the operation. It's impossible to stock everything in the e-commerce inventory. What we do is we send a vehicle to every Dhaka branch daily to collect products for confirmed orders.
Every morning, the e-commerce team creates a requisition sheet listing the required products for the day's orders. This sheet is then sent to the branches, asking them to transfer the items to the main warehouse. Developing this centralized sourcing process was the most challenging part. We never had this process in place.
With 700 to 800 orders daily, sorting inventory manually is extremely difficult. We had to gradually develop automation for this. When we had 10 or 20 orders, we did it manually. We would ask a branch to send the products.
When orders reached a couple of hundred daily, we could no longer do it manually. We had to introduce automation. We built software tools for automatic requisition. The software decides which branch has which product and so on. We try to collect all products from our branches in Dhaka. If we can't find a product within Dhaka, we then try to bring it from outside Dhaka.
We developed and fine-tuned these operational processes as we needed them. Still, we constantly fine-tune these operational techniques.
Of course, things don't always work perfectly. For example, sometimes a branch confirms a transfer in the software but doesn't physically send the product. Or, if the warehouse receives a laptop from a branch without proper checking, the physical product might later be missing. This is a complex operation, and errors can happen. We are constantly trying to minimize them as much as possible.
When we were dealing with a smaller number of products, we could manage it manually. But when 2,000 to 3,000 products are moving daily, manual checks are impossible, and human errors happen.
So we built another software tool that uses QR codes, barcodes, and serial numbers to scan and match the products received against the transfer request. Then it creates a report.
Ruhul: That leads to the excellent point we discussed earlier—how people use your site for research. How did that happen?
Sajid Bhai: It happened through SEO. We tried to list all IT products on our website. We still try to list all the products that we find on our website. We want customers to find the research information, even if they don't buy from us, on our website. I mentioned at the beginning that product content is paramount in e-commerce.
Customers buy based on the content: the creatives on Facebook, the descriptive videos, and how beautifully the product is described on the website. Our initial focus was entirely on content.
My initial goal was not sales, but traffic generation. We wanted to bring customers to our website. But bringing customers once is not enough; we have to make them come repeatedly. And to retain traffic, we had to provide the right information, and the UI/UX had to be excellent. We focused on how easily customers could navigate the website, add products to the cart, and save items.
We were also highly concerned about website speed and making the site lightweight. In those early days, broadband penetration was even less available in households. People were mostly using mobile data. If a page consumes 10MB to load, the customer won't use that website. Lightweight design, speed, UI/UX, and content were our main concerns from the beginning.
We continue to pay close attention to these things to this day.
Ruhul: Is there any set of best practices in SEO and these aspects? How should people think about SEO? There are ecommerce and digital businesses that often struggle with this.
Sajed: For SEO, the most important thing is making useful and unique content. How useful, unique, and high-quality your content is, how much users are engaging with your website, these things are more important. There is no shortcut for SEO.
Google's guideline is clear: do not build websites for Google, build them for the users. Google ranks websites that users enjoy, that have quality content, that are fast, and where users stay longer. If Google detects SEO tricks, it will penalize you.
We followed Google's guidelines when building our website. We learned extensively from our initial SEO consultants, whom we are grateful to, even though we now operate with an in-house team.
Large companies often start with massive investment and infrastructure. They think they have to go big immediately. We started small, grew step-by-step, and never aimed for huge targets.
Ruhul: You mentioned that while the foundation was laid earlier, the growth in orders happened during COVID.
Sajed: Yes, the boom in order generation started during COVID. Before COVID, we delivered around 50-60 orders daily. COVID changed that, and we suddenly had to deliver 400 to 500 orders.
This was a good thing, but it also presented different challenges. We couldn't provide adequate service because we were a small team operating beyond our capacity. The number of orders we were dealing with was far above our capacity. Many customers didn't receive confirmation calls, and service quality stumbled in many places. But people needed the products and became habituated to buying online, although service failure was present. However, we always tried to improve and reached out to our customers when we made a mistake or our service was subpar.
We received a significant boost during that period, and that momentum has continued. We have worked hard to maintain that momentum.
Ruhul: A challenge for many large companies is that they launch e-commerce platforms with huge investment, only for the initiative to fade away because they don't want to invest consistently in a business unit that is small compared to their main operation. We have seen that overcoming what is known as the innovator's dilemma, where a successful company fails to invest in new innovation, is very challenging. How did Star Tech, as an established company, handle this? You have built a dominant ecommerce business, which is quite rare for large companies.
Sajed: Large companies often start with massive investment and infrastructure. They think they have to go big immediately. We started small, grew step-by-step, and never aimed for huge targets.
Since Star Tech was already established, there was less pressure on the e-commerce unit. Even if we didn't generate high direct e-commerce sales, we were contributing to the company's overall branding. We were driving traffic and conversion to our shops. Even today, most conversions resulting from our online activity happen in our physical shops. I think that conversion number is higher than our ecommerce conversion in many instances.
Customers visit the shops after viewing the website or our social media activities. The company could see the impact of our ecommerce activities. The management knew that e-commerce activities were benefiting the shops. They had the information that customers were purchasing at shops after visiting us online. We weren’t making a lot of sales online, but our ecommerce activities were driving real results for our retail outlets and for our brands.
We didn't face pressure because the outlets were clearly benefiting. Moreover, we started small. We didn't go for a big investment at the beginning. We started with very low resources—just four or five people—and scaled the team gradually as the business grew.
The company saw that minimal investment was required, and we were generating returns in branding and shop traffic; they were supportive. Although the overall e-commerce operation ran at a loss initially, we reached breakeven within a year. The small team size meant that the profit from the 50 daily orders, which means 1500 orders monthly, was enough for the team to reach break-even within the first year.
Ruhul: Did you separate ecommerce as a separate business unit from the early days?
Sajed: E-commerce was tracked as a separate business unit from the beginning. When management saw that we were at break-even (by 2018) and contributing positively to the full company—attracting corporate and retail clients through branding and the website—they were happy.
We scaled the team gradually as our revenue and workload increased. We never increased the team at once. We increased the team size only when our revenue grew and we had more tasks that we couldn't handle with our existing team; only then did we add additional people to the team.
If we had started with a large team of 50 people, we would not have survived one year. If we invested 30 to 40 lakh taka in the team initially, the total investment after a year would have been huge, and the company couldn't have afforded it. It also would not have made sense for the company to make a large investment in a venture without revenue. If we started with a large setup from the beginning, I don't think we would have survived.
Large companies struggle because they start with a big setup but fail to achieve the expected returns. After a certain time, they become hopeless, leading them to shut down the business. This happened to many ecommerce initiatives by large companies, which started with massive investment. When you start with so much fanfare, it is difficult to survive when the market is not that big yet, and returns take a long time. E-commerce in Bangladesh is still growing. Online sales account for about 10% of the total retail market. It means if you expect the business to grow big overnight, you will be disappointed.
Ruhul: Give us an overview of Star Tech's ecommerce business today.
Sajed: E-commerce contributes 9% to 10% of our retail business at Star Tech. Star Tech Group has three concerns: Star Tech Engineering Limited, which focuses on corporate, government, and NGO clients, Distribution Hub Limited, which deals with imports and distributes 15+ brands, and Star Tech Limited, which is our retail operations.
Star Tech Limited generates revenue through retail outlets, e-commerce, and repair services. E-commerce share is 9% to 10% of Star Tech Limited's revenue. We have a team of around 70 people in the ecommerce unit.
Ruhul: Can you elaborate on the structure of your operations? You mentioned you have five separate teams that look after different parts of your operation. Can you expand on your thoughts behind this structure?
Sajed: We structured our operations based on observing how large teams and our international clients operated. We still follow that standard structure.
We currently have five teams. The web & SEO team manages the website and ensures that SEO and the web both remain updated. The Content Preparation team creates digital content, including static and video content. The Customer Support team handles all queries (hotline, Facebook, email) and confirms orders. The operations team manages the entire delivery process after confirmation. This includes product sourcing, billing, dispatching, cash collection, and accounts handover. The operations team also handles complex issues like product returns due to incorrect items or damaged-on-delivery products. Operations is the most complex part of our operations.
Having an established structure has helped us deliver reliable service to our customers. If we didn't do it this way, it would have created a subpar experience for our customers, and our growth would have suffered. You might be doing excellent SEO or digital marketing, but if your service is poor, your operation team is weak, if don't have an operation or a complaint management team, you wouldn't be able to deliver good service. And if you don't deliver good service to customers, you wouldn't be able to grow.
I have learned by watching others and through my own experience that you have to excel at operations to do well in ecommerce.
Similarly, we have always tried to remain lean. We only increased our team when the existing team reached its capacity. When we saw that we had a three-person team but they were struggling to manage the workload, we increased the number of people. That's how we have always increased our team.
The original structure, which started with four or five people, remains the same—only the numbers have grown.
Having an established structure has helped us deliver reliable service to our customers. If we didn't do it this way, it would have created a subpar experience for our customers, and our growth would have suffered.
Ruhul: What are your order numbers now? What is the average order size?
Sajed: We deliver around 700-800 orders daily. The average basket size is around 3,000 to 4,000 taka. Gadget items like smartwatches and headphones account for most orders.
However, we also deliver very large items, like a recent 11 lakh taka TV outside Dhaka. Big products like ACs or large TVs often go online because carrying them is a hassle for the customer.
Star Tech has been able to gain customer trust over the years. In the early days, trust was a factor. People had skepticism about online platforms. It has changed over the years. Many customers start with small orders, such as a mouse pad, and upon successful delivery, transition to bigger orders. Many customers still don't fully trust ecommerce, which is part of the reason behind the slow growth of the sector.
The main job of e-commerce is building trust. The e-commerce growth rate is still low because many people lack trust due to scams and poor services in many instances. As more people trust ecommerce, it will expand the market.
Ruhul: How could we change this—build trust in ecommerce? If you could change something about the market or policy end, what would it be?
Sajed: Policy changes are necessary due to the unstructured growth of the e-commerce market. In many developed countries, there is no Cash on Delivery (COD)—everything is prepaid.
Our COD system requires extensive operation because we have no guarantee that the customer will accept the product. Our ecommerce has a lot more operational overhead because of COD.
It also creates other operational challenges. For instance, roughly 10% of ecommerce orders are fake, where customers say they ordered by mistake. If we ship every online order without phone confirmation, we lose money on courier charges and waste our operational effort on orders that are fake or customers who don’t receive them. This forces us to have a delay in order confirmation, sometimes 12 hours, while we verify the customer. This is a major challenge. When we confirm an order late, it means we are not able to deliver it fast enough.
This lack of customer trust, resulting in low prepayment because customers can't trust the ecommerce sellers, makes online business difficult.
We use COD, which necessitates this verification hassle. We can't ask for 100% prepayment from customers because it wouldn't work.
We are trying to find other ways to improve our operational efficiency. For instance, with our established customer base, we assign a reputation score to each customer in our system. We automatically confirm orders from customers with a good reputation score without calling them.
Ruhul: How do you do the scoring?
Sajed: We have an algorithm. A successful delivery earns a score. Failure to take delivery results in a minus score. Based on this reputation score, we decide whether to use COD, require confirmation, or automatically confirm.
The operation involves many security risks. In the early days, these challenges were many and myriad. For instance, a customer once ordered a TV, took the product from the delivery person while claiming to go inside for the money, and then disappeared through a back door without making the payment.
We still face many different challenges, including security risks. There are areas in the country where you face certain risks in delivering products.
Operation is the biggest challenge for e-commerce in our country, and providing hassle-free customer service is a challenge.
Ruhul: What percentage of your customers are repeat customers?
Sajed: Repeat customers are between 30% and 40%.
Ruhul: That's excellent. Besides customer scoring, what other innovative things do you do to streamline your operations?
Sajed: Scoring is one filtering technique we use. We are also working on Express Delivery.
Ruhul: Is there any interaction between retail operations and e-commerce besides requisitioning products? Do many customers use store pickup?
Sajed: Yes, many customers use store pickup. We don't stock hot, slow-moving, or rare products (like an expensive motherboard) in the e-commerce warehouse because there's no guarantee they will sell before becoming over-aged. These products are often listed as "Available for Store Pickup Only."
If such an order comes in, we bring the product from a branch where it is available or from the supplier in case none of our stores have it, and encourage customers to pick it up from the store.
For expensive, rare, or slow-moving products, especially if it is a new customer, we ask for a small advance payment. This policy was created because we were often left with expensive products when customers failed to take delivery.
Most of the policies and initiatives are the result of some kind of failure. Customers didn't receive a service, or some other operational challenges occurred. But if it is a regular customer who has a good reputation score, we don't ask for advance payment.
Ruhul: What are your future plans for e-commerce?
Sajed: Our ecommerce evolution has always followed the market. Our current focus is on smoothing our operations as much as possible.
One of the main focuses now is on Express Delivery—delivering orders daily.
Our regular delivery currently takes three days. Day one is order confirmation, day two is billing and product collection, and day three is delivery. There is always one full day between the order date and the delivery date.
Ruhul: I had a few orders where the delivery person called me on the day of delivery, but the order hadn't been confirmed earlier. The delivery also took a few days, so far I can remember.
Sajed: That was likely because you had a good reputation score, so we automatically confirmed it without calling. You should have received a message.
The intermediate day is required because, if you order a product that is not in our warehouse, we need that time to collect it from a branch and bill it.
Ruhul: Can't you try hyper-local delivery from your nearest outlet? For example, I live in Mohammadpur. Can you deliver my order from your IDB outlet?
Sajed: We tried hyper-local delivery, but centralized operation proved to be the best practice. If you try to deliver products one by one, it becomes expensive and a lot of hassle. It also becomes very complex. That's why we have centralized our operations. We bring all products to our central warehouse. From there, products are delivered zone-wise. As I said, we tried different strategies, but this is the best approach that we have found.
We sat down with various logistics companies to see how they handle their logistics. And courier companies also use centralized distribution. Even if an order goes to the wrong city, they bring it back to Dhaka before redirecting it.
Because of this necessary centralization, we have one day between order and delivery for regular service.
We are now focused on Express Delivery. We have two options for delivery: Regular and Express.
We have added extra manpower and prioritize Express orders, delivering about 50 Express orders daily. We sometimes achieve same-day or next-day delivery, even outside Dhaka.
Ruhul: Is the delivery charge higher for express?
Sajed: Yes, we charge more because it requires extra manpower and logistics. For instance, if our scheduled delivery vehicle has already left, and an Express order comes in, we send a separate rider to collect the product from our designated branch.
Ruhul: What are your thoughts on the IT products ecommerce market? How big is the market, and where do you think the market is going?
Sajed: The penetration of technology products in Bangladesh is very low. A survey from about two years back found that only 6% people use tech products, which might have reached 10% of the population now who use technology products, meaning 90% do not.
Our laptop and computer penetration rate is very low. But this number will go up in the coming days. This low penetration rate is actually the biggest opportunity. It is not a drawback.
Laptop/desktop usage is very low. Since people don't use them now, they will in the future, and the market will grow significantly. There is a big opportunity here.
The e-commerce market, though currently unorganized, is growing at 20% to 30% every year. The penetration of ecommerce is around 10% of retail.
In many advanced markets, it is much higher. When we speak with our partners from markets like China, we see their ecommerce penetration is much higher. I also traveled to China. In China, around 70% of the retail market has moved to e-commerce.
Retail stores in China are mainly used as display centers. Staff focus on promoting products online through live streaming, using the physical store as a showroom. I personally visited retail outlets where we saw this.
If China has this kind of penetration, the US and EU should have similar or even higher penetration.
Bangladesh typically follows Europe and America by about 10 years. E-commerce will definitely grow here. I believe that within the next 10 years, e-commerce will share 50% of the total retail market. That number is around 10% now.
Ruhul: What are some of the biggest lessons from your journey so far on building an e-commerce business in Bangladesh?
Sajed: The biggest lesson is patience. You must be patient if you want to build a meaningful business in ecommerce because the return on investment takes time.
When the growth begins, it accelerates rapidly. But getting to the point of growth takes time. It is like those seeds that take a long time to germinate, but when the germination period ends, they grow fast.
The same is with ecommerce. It takes a long time to get to a point where it starts growing. The germination period is quite long. Once it starts growing, it then accelerates. So the important part is persistence. You have to stick with it for quite some time.
And you must focus on the four key pillars of e-commerce.
One is product and price. Work with products customers need, and ensure competitive pricing.
Second, customer service must be of high quality. You have to provide good customer service.
Third, content is extremely important. Since achieving free marketing like SEO overnight is difficult, you must publish high-quality content across your channels. If you spend money boosting poor content where the product specs or benefits are unclear, you won't get returns. Good content ensures high conversion rates.
Similarly, your UI/UX has to be good. If the website is slow, product photos are poor, or the ordering process (like finding the Add to Cart button) is difficult, the conversion rate will drop.
Finally, I advise newcomers to start small, with a low budget, and grow gradually. If your goal is to get rich overnight, e-commerce is not the way. Growth achieved through unsustainable offers (like 50% or 100% cashbacks) will not last and usually backfire.
Ruhul: How do you operate personally? How do you stay productive?
Sajed: I always try to find ways to make the work easier and minimize the need to hire new people. If a team member says a task is taking too long, we first try to simplify the process before considering additional resources or throwing money at a problem.
I also try to understand every job myself. For instance, I visit the warehouse once a week to understand the full operation process.
My primary job is to develop a clear process flow and ensure everyone follows it. I try to design a step-by-step workflow and make things easier for my people to execute.
For example, when we used to manually create transfer sheets from Excel files in the morning, the team complained that it was impossible when orders increased. Instead of hiring more people, I focused on reducing the workload. We created a small software tool for automated requisition. Similarly, we automated the creation of manifest sheets for couriers, which used to take a lot of time.
We always try to automate the existing process first. If automation is not possible, only then do I hire.
When we develop a process flow, we make sure everyone follows it. This is necessary because human nature resists new processes and tools. You must be strict sometimes to enforce the process.
I always think from the user's perspective: If I were the employee, how would I do the job, and how could it be made easiest?
Regarding personal productivity, it's hard to maintain focus when you are in a management role.
Most days, I can't start my own assigned work until after the Asr prayer (late afternoon). I prefer working late evenings for coding because it requires an interruption-free environment. During the day, there are constant management tasks, calls, and interruptions.
I come to the office late, around 10 or 11 AM, because that's when queries and follow-ups start. I handle these follow-ups all day until Asr, using phone reminders for scheduled tasks.
When I have some time, I browse and review our system data—checking orders placed, missed calls, and confirmations. When I find anomalies, I address them immediately.
The biggest lesson is patience. You must be patient if you want to build a meaningful business in ecommerce because the return on investment takes time. When the growth begins, it accelerates rapidly. But getting to the point of growth takes time. It is like those seeds that take a long time to germinate, but when the germination period ends, they grow fast.
Ruhul: Do you do monthly planning?
Sajed: No, we do daily planning. Team leaders submit a work plan every morning, detailing who will do what, and a work report at the end of the day. We work on a daily basis, not monthly or weekly.
Ruhul: Do you have monthly or weekly goals for sales, traffic, etc.?
Sajed: It is difficult to forecast or set fixed targets for those numbers because they are not entirely within our control. We focus more on the process. We have a daily guideline. For example, seven posts and one video must be published daily.
The team leaders divide up the work based on the day's order demand (e.g., 500 orders are divided among five billers) and give out the daily plan.
Ruhul: That’s an excellent approach. Focus on what you can control; the result should take care of itself. I think this is a good place to end this conversation. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Sajed: I appreciate your time as well. Thank you.
