Evaly Scam and Rising of our E-commerce

The country’s e-commerce sector witnessed a rough ride in 2021 as the sector had boomed in the first half of the year before the business suffered a serious setback due to scams by a number of e-commerce companies, shattering the public trust in the firms.

Only in two and a half years, an ordinary man handled billions of taka to build the so-called second largest e-commerce platform named Evaly in the country. Driving premium cars like Range Rover, Audi, the luxury of generous spending for advertisements and sponsoring, and even buying out startups despite their own struggles for funds – nothing was out of Evaly's own money.

 

Eventually, Evaly founder and Managing Director Mohammad Rassel and his wife and Evaly Chairman Shahima Nasrin were arrested on  following a case filed by one of their millions of defrauded customers.

But, with the advent of the pandemic, there has been a massive shift in shopping trends as people have gotten used to buying things online.

And now, the market is expected to triple in size by 2023, according to a recent report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on the cottage, micro, small, and medium enterprise (CMSME) sector. The local e-commerce sector is expected to be worth Tk26,000 crore or $3 billion next year from the current $1 billion or Tk8,500 crores, the report reads. At present, there are about 2,500 e-commerce companies in the country and at least 50,000 business pages on Facebook.