Update, October 2026 — The experts quoted here argued against a new statute and a new regulator. On the first point they were vindicated — no dedicated e-commerce act followed. On their wider assumption, that better enforcement of existing law was the answer, the outcome was different. How it played out is below the original article.
In the backdrop of current e-commerce scenario of the country, entrepreneurs and experts opined that the e-commerce sector does not need a new act and a separate regulator.
Speaking at a virtual dialogue organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) on Saturday, they also said the existing regulations and implementation of those with an increased monitoring of e-commerce activities would help bring discipline in the growing sector.
The dialogue moderated by CPD Executive Director Dr Fahmida Khatun discussed the recent growth, fraudulent behaviors of a number of e-commerce platforms, the recent changes in policies and ways to overcome the challenges.
Waseem Alim, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the top online grocery shop Chaldal, said it took four-five years for them to gain people's trust and after the recent cases of taking advances from customers and not delivering products or refunding their money is hurting online businesses as they find it tough to gain the confidence of new customers.
Like other countries, Bangladesh does not need a separate act and a regulator to govern e-commerce business, he opined, adding that an increased monitoring by existing government authorities would work better to bring discipline in the sector.
Fahim Mashroor, founder of a first-generation e-commerce platform AjkerDeal, said the Directorate of National Consumer Right Protection (DNCRP) should be strengthened and accountable more to resolve the current issues.
He further said Bangladesh Bank failed to prevent financial anomalies in e-commerce as the transactions took place within their jurisdiction and the central bank's indifference was apparent.
He stated that industry people warned the government three years ago about the risk of a situation that has emerged recently.
"We addressed the lack of transparency and issues within the business model of Evaly and other similar platform then and no action was taken," said Abdul Wahed Tomal, general secretary of the E-commcerce Association of Bangladesh.
There is a lack of coordination between the DNCRP, Ministry of Commerce, Bangladesh Bank and other stakeholders, he observed.
The country has laws to ensure consumer protection, fair competition and the existing laws could solve the problems, said Barrister Tanjib-ul Alam.
Lack of the relevant institutions' capacity and enforcement of the laws is apparent, said the legal expert.
He also opined that since the industry does not feel the need for a separate act and a new regulator, the government should not go for these as new institutions might further weaken the relevance of the existing ones.
Professor Rehman Sobhan, chairman of the CPD, blamed the lack of good governance in the country for the embezzlement of e-commerce customers' money.
Echoing other speakers, Wasim Aleem said the problem is not with e-commerce, it is rather observed in many sectors in Bangladesh where someone can take advances from the people to deliver something and later does not make it happen.
He mentioned commodity and real estate sectors for example.
Md Ziaul Haque Bhuiyan, chief of staff of a business-to-business e-commerce ShopUp, questioned the banking sector's role to help prevent the financial misconducts that took place in e-commerce as huge transactions to defraud customers took place through the banking channel.
He urged for a strong monitoring of e-commerce activities.
Lack of monitoring into some errant e-commerce sites including Evaly, Dhamaka and e-orange has left over a million customers and several thousand e-commerce merchants defrauded as the sites owe several thousand crore of taka to them and now the owners are either in jail or absconded.
Selim R F Hossain, managing director of Brac Bank, said whatever happened in some e-commerce sites was due to mistakes by every stakeholder and now it is most important to recover the money of the people who were cheated by the controversial e-commerce companies.
How the argument resolved
Three positions were available in 2021: pass a dedicated e-commerce act, create a dedicated regulator, or enforce the laws already on the books. The experts in this article argued for the third.
What arrived was a fourth option that was not really on the table at the time — a change to how money moves, imposed through the central bank rather than through commercial law.
A customer's advance no longer reaches the seller at the moment of purchase. It is held until the goods arrive, and the duty to enforce that was placed not on the sellers but on the licensed institutions that process their card and wallet payments, each of which had to adopt a policy governing which platforms it would serve.
Why that beat both options under discussion
The experts' objection to a new regulator was sound. A new agency would have needed staff, powers, a budget and several years to become competent, and would then have been supervising thousands of online sellers with the usual result — attention concentrated on whoever was already in the news.
But their alternative had a weakness the article does not record. Enforcing existing law means acting after a breach: fraud is prosecuted once the money has gone, which is precisely when it cannot be recovered. Better enforcement makes the punishment more likely; it does not make the loss less likely.
Putting the obligation on the payment layer avoids both problems at once. The supervised population shrinks from thousands of merchants to a few dozen licensed institutions, and the intervention lands before the harm instead of after it: money a seller never receives is money a seller cannot misdirect.
The general principle
This is worth carrying beyond Bangladesh, because the same debate recurs wherever a digital market fails.
The instinct is to reach for a new law or a new supervisor for the sector in trouble. Often the more effective intervention is to find the chokepoint that already exists — usually payments, occasionally app distribution or advertising — and place the duty there. Those chokepoints are few in number, already licensed, already examined, and structurally positioned to prevent harm rather than to document it afterwards.
The experts here were right that the sector did not need its own statute. The thing they did not anticipate was that it did not need its own regulator either, because it already had one — in a different ministry, supervising a different industry, sitting on the only part of the transaction that mattered.
