50 Ecommerce Website Problems and Which Ones You Can Skip

Ecommerce website problems in Bangladesh: hosting, gateways, trade licence, Cash on Delivery, security, scaling. What a site costs in taka, and what to skip.

Shamim Hossain7 October 2026

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Say you sell hand-painted tote bags from a Facebook page with 20,000 followers (an invented example, but a common one). Orders come in by Messenger, you note them in a copybook, and one evening a reel takes off. You decide it’s time for a real website. That decision quietly signs you up for a developer, a host, a domain, a payment gateway, a pile of paperwork and a security job that never ends.

This post lists the 50 ecommerce website problems that come with that decision, grouped into ten categories, with the taka cost of the pieces we could source. Most lists online are written for American stores and skip the Bangladesh part: the trade licence a gateway asks for, cash on delivery, the setup fee before your first sale. We also show, category by category, which problems you skip by selling on হবে নাকি Coffee? instead, and which ones you still carry.

What does it cost to run your own ecommerce website in Bangladesh?

Here is the build-up, using only figures we could trace to a source. Shopify’s Basic plan costs $25 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly, and it adds up to 2% on each sale when you use a third-party payment provider.^[3] You will use one, because Bangladesh isn’t on the list of countries where Shopify Payments works.^[4] WooCommerce is free software, but its own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each.^[5]

A .com.bd domain costs Tk 700 for the first year and Tk 1,020 to renew, after the January 2026 price cut.^[6] SSL can be free through Let’s Encrypt.^[7] Gateways are where it bites: in 2021, setup fees ran from about 4,000 to 20,000 BDT, with SSLCommerz at 15,000 BDT and per-transaction charges of 2% to 4%.^[8] Those are five-year-old figures, so ask each gateway for today’s price. And someone has to build it: 80% of software engineers in Bangladesh earn between 18K and 101K BDT a month.^[1]

The platform fee is a share of each sale, not a monthly bill; the current rate is on the pricing page.

The 50 ecommerce website problems, by category

Every list below has two sides. On the left, the problems you take on when you run the site yourself, which a shop here doesn’t have. On the right, what’s built in instead. A few numbers frame the whole thing.

Sources: Baymard^[9], Google and SOASTA^[10], the International Trade Administration^[11] and Patchstack.^[12]

Building the site

The first wall is people. A 2021 UNB report on starting ecommerce in Bangladesh named an acute shortage of skilled staff among the sector’s main problems,^[2] and a decent developer’s monthly pay can be more than a small page earns in a quarter.

Hosting and scaling to 10,000+ visitors

Say a reel sends ten thousand people to your link in an hour. On a cheap shared host, that’s when the site goes down, at the one moment it matters. Speed matters even on a quiet day: Google’s research found 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.^[10] Keeping a store fast under load means caching, a CDN, database tuning and someone watching it at 2 a.m. Then there’s hostile traffic. Cloudflare counted 935 network-layer DDoS attacks over 1 Tbps in the first half of 2026, and 90.60% of attacks were over in under ten minutes, faster than a person can react.^[14]

Storage is the one limit to know about: each creator gets 1 GB free, and more needs a paid storage plan.

Domain, SSL and email

None of these is hard alone. Together they’re a list of things that break quietly. A domain lapses because a renewal email went to an old address. A free Let’s Encrypt certificate^[7] expires because auto-renewal failed. Gmail asks senders to set up SPF and DKIM authentication for their domain,^[15] and without it your order confirmations land in spam. And buyers are wary of sites they don’t know: 19% of shoppers in Baymard’s research abandoned an order because they didn’t trust the site with their card details.^[9]

The honest trade: you can’t use your own domain. If a branded .com is part of your plan, that’s a real reason to run your own site.

Security

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, and WordPress plugins are the soft spot. Patchstack recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across WordPress in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and for the most targeted flaws the median time to mass exploitation was five hours.^[12] Five hours is less than a working day. If your site takes cards, PCI DSS applies to any business that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data.^[16]

Payments and payouts

To take bKash and cards on your own site you need a merchant account with a gateway. SSLCommerz’s onboarding list asks for an updated trade licence, TIN, NID, a bank cheque leaf and a signed merchant form, among other papers.^[17] Then you build the callback that tells your site a payment went through, test it, and handle the times it arrives twice or not at all. We wrote more about why money gets held up in why creator money gets stuck in Bangladesh.

If you live abroad, the shop itself works from anywhere, but withdrawing needs a Bangladeshi NID and a bKash, Nagad or Rocket number or bank account in Bangladesh. Buyers always pay in taka.

Paperwork and policies

This is the part of Bangladeshi ecommerce that global guides never mention. The Digital Commerce Operational Guideline 2021 expects online sellers to show a trade licence, TIN and a business ID, and to publish their terms and return policy in Bangla.^[20] The Digital Business ID (DBID) is harder than it sounds: more than 85% of ecommerce applicants failed to get one, according to a 2023 report.^[19] The rules also pull against each other. Bangladesh Bank said in 2020 that micro traders no longer need trade documents to open merchant accounts with banks or mobile financial services,^[18] yet SSLCommerz still lists a trade licence today.^[17]

What the platform doesn’t ask for is not the same as what the law asks of you. Your own tax position is still yours to check; start with the tax and reporting page.

Orders, stock and delivery

More than 90% of ecommerce users in Bangladesh prefer to pay cash on delivery,^[11] so a shop without Cash on Delivery loses most buyers before they start. The operational guideline also sets delivery deadlines: five days within the same city and ten days elsewhere.^[20] Hitting those while tracking stock in a notebook is how sellers end up apologising for an item they sold twice.

You still pack the parcel and hand it to the courier, and a buyer who refuses a Cash on Delivery parcel is still your loss. The platform keeps the record; the box is yours.

Refunds, returns and cancellations

Refunds have rules now. Under Bangladesh Bank’s digital payment policy, a cancelled digital payment must be refunded within a maximum of three days.^[21] On your own site, that means building a refund that goes back through the gateway, then checking it really landed. Returns policies matter at checkout too: 13% of shoppers in Baymard’s research abandoned an order over an unsatisfactory one.^[9]

Customers and support

Buyers ask the same five questions on Messenger, WhatsApp and email, and every answer is typed by hand. Forcing them to make an account first costs you more: 18% of shoppers in Baymard’s research abandoned a checkout because the site wanted them to create one.^[9] UNB’s 2021 report found Bangladeshi platforms struggling to keep even 10% of customers coming back.^[2]

Growth, cost and time

A new domain starts with no traffic, and your audience is already on Facebook. A 2024 report counted more than 5 lakh company pages in Bangladesh, 2 to 2.5 lakh of them run by f-commerce sellers.^[13] Across all stores, the average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, and 40% of abandoners blame extra costs such as shipping and fees.^[9] If you’re still deciding whether your page can earn at all, read do followers mean income? first.

The problem that isn’t on the list is time. Every hour spent renewing certificates or chasing a callback is an hour not spent making the tote bags.

How হবে নাকি Coffee? solves these problems

Fifty problems is a long list, so here is the approach in one place. The idea is simple: the parts that break, expire or need a specialist are run for you, and what’s left is the part only you can do, which is making and selling your product.

All of it sits inside one platform fee, with no monthly fee for the core services. The pricing page has the current rate.

We’d rather be plain about what stays with you. You still pack the parcels, bring in your own buyers, and check your own tax position. You can’t use your own domain, and each creator gets 1 GB of storage free before a paid storage plan is needed.

When your own ecommerce website is the right call

A platform isn’t the answer for every seller, and pretending otherwise would make this list less useful.

For most page sellers starting out, the platform covers what a site would, without the fixed costs. If you’re coming from a Facebook page with no shop at all, how to turn your Facebook page into income is the place to start.

FAQ

The site was never the product. The tote bags were, and the hours you get back go to them.

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