Pickaboo sells over 200 air conditioners daily during peak season in Bangladesh. The company claims this volume, combined with its broader electronics sales, saves Bangladeshi consumers significant money annually while maintaining healthy profit margins.
This achievement becomes more remarkable when you consider the context. Bangladesh's $7 billion consumer electronics market was dominated by traditional retailers operating with substantial markups until recently. Traditional retailers still dominate the market but their pricing power has reduced significantly. An air conditioner that traditional stores sold for 70,000 Taka now sells for 20% less industry-wide, largely due to pricing pressure created by ecommerce price transparency by companies like Pickaboo.
The transformation extends beyond Pickaboo's own success. Today, consumers routinely use online prices to negotiate with traditional retailers, a dynamic that didn't exist three/four years ago. Pickaboo and many other ecommerce players have effectively reset pricing expectations across Bangladesh's entire electronics retail sector.
What makes this story particularly instructive is how conventional the underlying business model appears. Pickaboo, as evident from above details, exemplifies this principle. Founded in 2016, the company has achieved something that eludes most e-commerce players, genuine profitability through what CEO Morin Talukder describes as "solving the fundamental customer problems."
There's a counterintuitive truth about e-commerce or business in general: the most successful companies are the ones who do the basic best.
Yet this apparent simplicity masks a sophisticated understanding of market dynamics and sophisticated execution of fundamental retail principles that has reshaped an entire market.
The story begins with a market distortion that most consumers took for granted. Traditional electronics retailers in Bangladesh operated with substantial margins, selling air conditioners for no less than 70,000 Taka when more competitive pricing was entirely feasible. This wasn't necessarily due to greed or inefficiency, it was simply how the market functioned in the absence of transparent price competition.
Pickaboo along with a growing ecommerce scene changed this dynamic not through venture capital subsidization or predatory pricing, but through volume procurement and operational efficiency.
When Morin explains that an air conditioner with a 75000 Taka maximum retail price can be purchased for 52,000 Taka and sold profitably at 57,000-58,000 Taka, he's describing a fundamental restructuring of value chains.
The traditional retailer selling the same unit for 70,000 Taka wasn't necessarily earning outsized profits, they were simply operating with higher costs and lower volumes.
What makes this particularly interesting is the market-wide impact. Today, those same traditional retailers sell comparable air conditioners for 56,000 Taka. The transformation wasn't gradual, it was driven by consumers using transparent online pricing as leverage in offline negotiations. "When the retailer sees that the customer buys online and the current market scenario, the customer shows the online price and compares, the retailer starts offering similar pricing," Morin observes.
This represents something more significant than competitive pricing. Pickaboo inadvertently created a new market standard that forced industry-wide margin compression.
The company's success lies not in defeating competitors but in reshaping the competitive landscape itself.
What distinguishes Pickaboo from many e-commerce companies is its disciplined focus on a single vertical. While competitors spread resources across multiple categories, Pickaboo concentrated entirely on consumer electronics, mobile phones and gadgets, a decision that proved crucial to its ability to achieve meaningful scale and operational efficiency.
This focus enabled deep expertise in product specifications, warranty management, and technical support that generalist platforms struggle to match.
More importantly, it allowed the company to develop the supplier relationships and procurement volumes necessary to access pricing that creates genuine competitive advantages rather than temporary promotional tactics.
Pickaboo's market strategy reveals sophisticated thinking about consumer behavior in emerging markets. Rather than focusing on Bangladesh's 180 million population, Morin concentrates on what he terms the upgraders and mac population, approximately 3 million people annually who are replacing or purchasing new electronics.
This demographic insight drives everything from inventory planning to marketing strategy. These upgraders, as Morin describes them, represent "entirely online customers" who are "perfectly within our target group", urban consumers who prioritize convenience and value better products accessed from home comfort.
The behavioral pattern here challenges common assumptions about price sensitivity in emerging markets. "People don’t buy online only because of offers, they want value addition along with better price" Morin notes. "They want to buy better products sitting at home comfortably." The implication is that convenience can command premiums even in price-conscious markets, provided the value proposition is clear and the operational execution is flawless.
This understanding extends to market timing and product selection.
With washing machine penetration below 1 percent and smart TV penetration at only 15 percent, Pickaboo is positioned to benefit from predictable household modernization trends.
The company isn't creating demand so much as capturing inevitable upgrade cycles with superior pricing and convenience.
The mechanics of Pickaboo's profitability model become clear when examining its air conditioner sales during peak seasons.
Selling 200+ units daily isn't just impressive volume, it represents a fundamentally different approach to margin optimization than most e-commerce companies employ.
Traditional retail wisdom suggests that margins improve through premium positioning or value-added services. Pickaboo achieves margin improvement through volume procurement and inventory velocity.
When you're purchasing hundreds of air conditioners at a time, suppliers offer pricing that smaller retailers cannot access. This creates a virtuous cycle where volume enables better pricing, which drives more volume, which improves procurement terms further.
The strategy requires significant working capital and operational sophistication. Moving 200 air conditioners daily demands robust logistics capabilities, precise demand forecasting, and strong supplier relationships. But once these operational challenges are solved, the model becomes defensible, competitors cannot easily replicate the volume required to access similar procurement pricing.
More importantly, this approach aligns company interests with consumer welfare. Pickaboo's margins improve as it passes procurement savings to customers, creating sustainable competitive advantages that don't rely on information asymmetries or market inefficiencies.
One aspect of Pickaboo's evolution that deserves attention is its decision to establish in-house service capabilities. Customers can rely on Pickaboo for set-up, post-purchase services and so on.
This move addresses a common challenge in electronics retail—post-purchase support quality often determines long-term customer relationships more than initial pricing.
By integrating service capabilities—installation service and own fleet delivery, Pickaboo solved several problems simultaneously. It reduced external dependencies that could affect customer experience, created additional revenue streams, and strengthened relationships with manufacturer partners who value retailers capable of complete lifecycle management.
This integration also reflects deeper strategic thinking about sustainable competitive advantages. While competitors can potentially match pricing through their own volume procurement, replicating comprehensive service capabilities requires significant investment and operational expertise.
The combination of competitive pricing and reliable service creates customer loyalty that transcends transactional relationships.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Pickaboo's growth has been shaped significantly by capital constraints rather than abundant funding. "Rasing capital remains a major challenge in Bangladesh," Morin observes.
This is true. The amount of venture capital raised by all VC-funded ecommerce companies is meagre compared to the opportunity the market offers.
That said, constraint can be useful sometimes. This scarcity has imposed disciplined focus that might not have emerged with abundant venture capital. Without external funding to subsidize customer acquisition or inventory expansion, every strategic decision had to generate sustainable unit economics.
The company couldn't afford to experiment with multiple verticals or complex channel strategies, it needed to achieve profitability through operational excellence in their chosen category.
The constraint also influenced its approach to customer outreach. Rather than attempting to match larger competitors across all categories, Pickaboo concentrated resources where it could achieve decisive advantages. This focused approach has created market leadership in electronics despite limited capital resources.
Morin argues that this capital constraint actually creates advantages compared to other emerging markets. "Compared to the Vietnam market, we are in a much better position," he suggests, implying that Bangladesh's market timing and competitive dynamics offer better risk-reward ratios despite funding challenges.
The broader impact of Pickaboo's success extends beyond its own financial performance. By introducing transparent pricing in a market previously characterized by information asymmetries, it has created behavioral changes that benefit consumers industry-wide.
The example Morin provides is striking: "go to any offline retail store, show them the online price for a Samsung refrigerator or Haier AC, and they will instantly discount."
This wasn't possible two years ago. Traditional retailers now automatically adjust pricing when presented with online alternatives, suggesting that Pickaboo has fundamentally altered negotiation dynamics across the electronics retail sector.
This market transformation represents value creation in the truest sense. Rather than extracting value through superior information or market position, ecommerce has increased overall market efficiency. To that end, Pickaboo’s success doesn't come at the expense of consumer welfare, it actively improves consumer outcomes while generating sustainable profits.
What makes Pickaboo's approach particularly instructive is how conventional business principles, executed with discipline and focus, can create transformative market impact.
Morin's description of Pickaboo’s model as "doing the fundamentals better" reflects an understanding that sustainable competitive advantages often emerge from operational excellence with tech automation.
This perspective challenges prevailing assumptions about e-commerce success, particularly in emerging markets where venture capital often focuses on novel approaches or platform strategies.
Pickaboo's success suggests that fundamental retail principles, competitive pricing, reliable service, convenient access, remain powerful when executed with sophistication and scale.
The company's ability to save consumers 300 crore Taka annually while maintaining healthy margins demonstrates that efficient markets can benefit all participants. This isn't zero-sum competition but value creation through operational efficiency and transparent pricing.
The trajectory of Pickaboo's growth suggests several broader lessons about e-commerce profitability in emerging markets.
First, that focused vertical strategies can create more sustainable advantages than horizontal platform approaches, particularly for companies with limited capital resources.
Second, that volume-based profitability models can align company interests with consumer welfare in ways that premium positioning strategies cannot.
Perhaps most importantly, Pickaboo's experience suggests that market timing and operational discipline often matter more than innovative business models or abundant funding. The company's position as Bangladesh modernizes and consumers upgrade their electronics creates opportunities that careful execution can capture profitably.
The challenge ahead lies in maintaining competitive advantages as the market grows and potentially attracts larger competitors with superior capital resources.
However, Pickaboo's early success in creating market-wide pricing standards and establishing strong manufacturer relationships suggests it has built defenses that extend beyond their own operational capabilities.
Pickaboo’s story offers a case study in how conventional business principles, applied with focus and discipline in well-chosen markets, can generate both financial success and societal benefit.
In an industry often characterized by unsustainable unit economics and venture capital subsidization, Pickaboo represents a different path, one where profitability and consumer value creation reinforce each other sustainably.
For entrepreneurs and business operators in emerging markets, the lesson is clear: sometimes the most effective strategy is executing fundamental principles exceptionally well.
The innovation lies not in the business model but in the quality of execution and depth of market understanding that makes extraordinary results from ordinary approaches possible.
