Online trading opens a new era of cost saving, transparency

Over the past few years, conventional physical trading has taken a back seat and online trading has been gaining ground in what is now the new era of business. The global business scene has flourished online. Classifieds, e-commerce, hotels, superstores and airlines -- almost all products and services -- are now accessible online. The fast pace of life, consumers’ impatience and the immediacy of every deal by buyers and sellers redefined the practices of trade and commerce. 

This global phenomenon has also touched the business scene in Bangladesh, and just in the last five years B2C interactions have begun a paradigm shift, moving from conventional methods to online means.

Urban Bangladesh is trading everything on the net -- lands to apartments to cars to fashion and lifestyle products to groceries. Revenue from e-commerce is hitting promising numbers: Tk 300 crore a year. Industry analysts project significant growth in five years. But B2B trading here is yet to adopt the online platform widely. 

Let’s understand the need for a stronger B2B online business platform.

Take a look at “Situation A” from a buyer’s point of view: a business conglomerate is trying to buy raw materials for its production. In most cases, raw materials will be sourced through a manual process of tendering with its enlisted suppliers followed by another round of interaction for pricing quotes and queries and then the selection of the supplier who would be given the job.

Look at the other side, from a seller’s point of view. A new supplier has imported a potentially good product required for the garment industry. How is it going to penetrate its core TG and convey its product availability to them? Generally, the marketing team of the company will be pushing its limits to set up meetings with potential clients they have access to and then spend endless hours to find ways of penetrating new potential clients.

Both the scenarios raise a few questions. The conventional business model comes with a bundle of uncertainties, lack of transparency, corruption, drainage of financial resources, loss of time and inefficiency. Why would you want all of this when you can do away with it?

For buyers, an online platform needs to give them access to a big basket of verified sellers, to provide a greater variety of options to choose from and simplify procurement and tendering activity by reducing the needed time and effort. In addition, the platform needs to facilitate buyers with information on ratings of suppliers, generate automated comparative statements from received quotations, and let buyers coordinate the sourcing activity from anywhere, anytime without any political or environmental or transportation barrier.

On the other hand, for sellers, a platform needs to give sellers exposure to new buyers and conduct business with the companies that were previously inaccessible, bring the buyers into one marketplace from all over Bangladesh and thus give the platform to sellers to do business with a large customer reach and provide accessibility to sellers to promote and sell products into a greater marketplace with countrywide coverage. For sellers, the online platform shall keep them connected to customers and the market to judge current requirement trends and demands as well as provide an opportunity to operate business without any physical presence and save on time, effort and costs.

Under the strong digitally enabled operation vision of the government for every sector, it has put emphasis on the process of e-tendering across its ministries and operational bodies, and the execution is already underway. So it is time for the private sector to adopt similar online tendering and sourcing processes for increasing business productivity.

Bangladesh has a robust pool of tech brains, which makes us confident that a B2B online platform for buyers and sellers may be just around the corner or may already be here, waiting for the spotlight. We need our very own Alibaba, tailor-made for our B2B needs.

The writer is the director for planning and investment management at MediaAxis, an affiliate of Aegis Dentsu network.