Social commerce in Bangladesh

DataReportal counted a Facebook ad reach of 64 million people in Bangladesh in late 2025, alongside 56 million adults on TikTok, nearly 50 million on YouTube and 9 million on Instagram [1]. Dhaka alone was the largest city audience reachable by Facebook ads anywhere in the world, at 2.99 crore [2]. e-CAB counted over 5 lakh Bangladeshi business pages, 2 to 2.5 lakh of them run by f-commerce entrepreneurs, with about 60,000 selling regularly [3].

64m

Facebook ad reach in Bangladesh, October 2025[1]

2.99 cr

Facebook ad reach in Dhaka, the largest city audience in the world[2]

2 to 2.5 lakh

f-commerce entrepreneur pages (e-CAB)[3]

1. 01

   Post

   A photo or reel with a price in the caption, often with sizes and colours in the comments.

2. 02

   Inbox

   The buyer messages. Size, colour, address and phone number are collected by chat.

3. 03

   Confirm

   Many sellers ask for the delivery charge by bKash to confirm the order is serious.

4. 04

   Courier

   The seller books a courier (often through a courier app that integrates with pages) and the parcel goes out cash on delivery.

• Zero setup. A page, a phone and a courier account is a business.
• Personal. The buyer talks to a person, in Bangla, and gets a reply in minutes.
• Discovery. Reels and shares put products in front of people who were not searching.
• Trust by proximity. A page with years of posts, tagged customers and answered comments builds a track record in public.

• Rented land. Restrictions, reach drops and policy changes hit sellers with no warning; the 2024 restriction wave stranded many pages [3].
• No system of record. Orders in a hundred chat threads mean missed sizes and wrong addresses.
• No policy page. Return terms live in a comment, if anywhere. Buyers notice.
• Nothing proves the seller exists. A page has no address, no size chart per product, no tracking page.
• Every conversation is manual. The same five questions, delivery charge first, asked all day.

Menlab started where every brand here starts, and the page is still the front door. What changed is where the order happens. A few things made the jump work.

• Link to the product, not the homepage. One tap from a post should land on the product page with the price, the size chart and the delivery charge visible. A homepage loses the shopper.
• Keep the chat. WhatsApp is on every page, and the on-site assistant answers in Banglish, so moving to a website did not mean losing the conversation.
• Show the charge before the order. The delivery charge is the question that every inbox opens with. The checkout answers it the moment a division is picked.
• Keep cash on delivery. The site never asks for a card. The risk stays with us, as it did on the page.
• Give the site what the page cannot. Per-product size charts, a written return policy, live tracking, a studio address and named founders. Those are the reasons to leave the inbox.

Reels and TikTok have changed discovery from a photo with a price to a person wearing the product. Newer apps such as Hoppi build shopping around that: video, creators and a curated set of brands rather than an endless catalogue. The shopper they bring is younger and more brand-aware. Menlab lists there as well as on its own site, and treats it the way it treats Facebook: a place to be found, with the site as the place to be trusted.

• Put your area and a phone number on the page. Anonymity costs sales.
• Write the return policy once, pin it, and repeat it in every order chat.
• Photograph your own stock. Supplier images produce refused parcels.
• Send tracking codes. A moving parcel is a parcel that gets accepted.
• When the volume justifies it, put the catalogue on a site of your own, and keep the page as the door. Our industry guide covers the trade-offs.