Editor’s note, October 2026 — This report was published in 2021 and is kept here as it appeared. It has not aged well: Alesha Mart went on to become one of the e-commerce platforms named in the sector-wide collapse that followed, and the High Court later ordered an inquiry into the official negligence that allowed it. What happened next is set out below the original article.
Alesha Mart got the certificate regarding this on 2 September from the Dun & Bradstreet South Asia Middle East Limited, said a press release.
The E-commerce venture was selected for the recognition as Alesha Mart doesn't have any irregularity in its balance sheet and in the accounts of incomes and expenditures, according to the media release.
Alesha Mart is a part of Alesha Holding which has 13 more wings and it is prepared to tackle any crisis without assistance from any other party.
Alesha Mart will support all kind of government measured to regain the trust of the customers, the e-commerce platform said, adding that it is also ready to ensure refunds if any customer seek to withdraw their payments.
The e-commerce platform started its journey in January this year and its turnover in six months reached Tk1,100 crore, lesha Mart Managing Director Monzul Alam Sikdar claimed on 18 July.
The Bangladesh Bank in June sought bank statements from several e-commerce companies as some private banks suspended their payments gateways with the e-commerce ventures.
Later, the commerce ministry issued the e-commerce guideline.
What the certificate was, and was not
A Dun & Bradstreet certificate of this kind is a business-information listing based on documents the company itself supplies; it is not an audit of whether customer orders are being delivered, and it was issued in the weeks when Evaly, E-orange and Dhamaka were collapsing and every surviving platform was trying to signal that it was different.
What happened next
Updated September 2026. Alesha Mart, which had sold motorcycles at steep discounts on advance payment, stopped deliveries within months of this announcement, closed its offices and stopped answering customers by early 2022. Buyers who had paid for motorcycles months earlier filed cases and complaints with the Directorate of National Consumer Rights Protection, and the company's managing director Monzul Alam Sikder faced cheque-dishonour cases through 2022 and 2023. Under the Digital Commerce Operation Guidelines 2021, advance payments now sit in escrow with the payment gateway until the product is delivered, which is the protection Alesha Mart's customers did not have.
What happened next
Within months of this article, the model it describes had failed across the sector. The pattern was the same everywhere: platforms took advance payments at deep discounts, used the money to fund earlier orders, and could not deliver when new deposits slowed.
Alesha Mart itself ended up named alongside Evaly, E-Orange, Dhamaka, Aladiner Prodip, Dalal Plus and QCoom in a High Court order requiring senior financial and government officials to establish whose negligence had let the schemes run.
Why "timely delivery" was the wrong thing to measure
The point carries beyond Alesha Mart, to any market with platforms of this kind.
Delivery performance is a lagging indicator in a business funded by advances. A platform paying for today's orders out of tomorrow's deposits delivers well while deposits are growing — punctuality is what the money is being spent on. The failure appears only when new deposits slow, at which point the shortfall is already fixed.
So an award for prompt delivery, given at the top of the cycle, measured the one thing that could not distinguish a solvent operator from an insolvent one. The figure that would have distinguished them was the ratio of customer liabilities to current assets, which no customer could see and no award considered.
The regulatory answer that followed addressed exactly this: customers' advance payments are now held by Bangladesh Bank and released to the merchant only after delivery, which removes the pool of money that made the pattern possible in the first place.
