The e-commerce market will expand by eight times by 2020 if a friendly policy framework is in place, industry operators said yesterday.

At present, annual sales in e-commerce are worth about Tk 1,000 crore, and the industry operators are expecting the market to balloon to Tk 8,000 crore (about $1 billion) in four years.

“We expect everyone from Bangladesh, even those from the remotest village, will be able to purchase products through the e-commerce platform,” said Razib Ahmed, president of the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh or e-CAB.

To unlock that potential, the government will have to pass a modern policy, he said, adding that e-CAB has drafted in a guideline and will forward it to the relevant authorities shortly.

Ahmed's comments came at the inaugural session of a conference styled 'Local and Foreign Investment in Bangladesh', held at the capital's Radisson hotel.

In a separate session, Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu said the government has already passed different acts and policies on digitisation and some will need to be formulated.

“We also found that banks are not moving with the digital business. They need to come onboard for e-commerce business to flourish,” he added.

Tarana Halim, state minister for telecom, said the telecom division, the telecom regulator, ICT and commerce ministries and Bangladesh Bank need to sit together to draw up a robust policy and regulation for the e-commerce business.

Owners of e-commerce business should plan for the next 10 years, said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for ICT.

“Traditional forms of business will become obsolete and to become a real digital country we need to look toward e-commerce.”

The internet is the key for the e-commerce business and the current government has slashed the bandwidth price significantly. As a result, there are more than six crore internet users in Bangladesh.

“That is a very favourable scenario for the e-commerce industry,” Palak said.

Entrepreneurs and some policymakers also touched upon the issue of foreign investment in e-commerce.

Mobile operators should be restricted from entering the e-commerce and mobile financial services sphere, said Nazrul Islam Khan, curator of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Memorial Museum.

“Mobile operators have influence across different sectors and none can ignore it. Here, we need to be tactful to restrict them from this business,” said Khan, who is also a former secretary of the ICT division.

The government should restrict mobile companies from running an e-commerce business, said Shameem Ahsan, former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services.

Ahsan, who runs e-commerce site Bagdoom, said if global giants like Alibaba and Amazon are allowed into Bangladesh, they will grab the entire e-commerce market and the local players will lose their investment.

Subsequently, he called for a bar on foreign entrants in the e-commerce scene. “Now is the right time to put it in a policy.”

He cited the case of the pharmaceutical and education sectors, for which the government put a bar on 100 percent foreign ownership. “The country as a whole get good result of it,” he added. 

At present, there are about 1,000 e-commerce entrepreneurs, many of whom are running their business via Facebook.