In this COVID-19 pandemic more and more businesses are happening through e-commerce platforms globally. It is becoming a common norm in the industries and parties to make B2B and B2C transactions online. Online wholesalers and consumers alike presume online buying and selling to be easy, efficient, and safe.
International e-commerce companies like Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, etc. have created an immense opportunity for Bangladesh’s readymade garment (RMG) industry, the 2nd largest apparel exporter in the world.
These platforms connected apparel makers with international buyers easily, reduced travel costs, and established the digital communication modes between them. As a whole, it reduced operational costs.
However, the RMG makers could not fully adopt in utilizing these digital platforms as a new marketing strategy and conduct international business. This is largely due to a couple of factors, including the difficulty of receiving payments through these platforms, which mostly works with escrow systems, which is not available at the moment in Bangladesh.
And also, unfortunately, because of some past incidents, local apparel makers do not enjoy a very good reputation when it comes to being dependable and trustworthy. This is a big hindrance when it comes to getting large orders from international buyers.
Besides, online transactions are ‘card-not-present’ transactions. As e-commerce increases, prospects for fake misuse of payment networks and data theft grow side by side.
In addition to more obvious fraud-monitoring tools such as the customer account, validation services, and purchase tracking, a certified Level 1 PCI DSS payment processor’s risk management staff can sniff out fraud before it occurs.
Chargebacks, in addition to being costly, can damage business reputations; an excessive number of chargebacks can lead to closed merchant accounts, effectively killing the business.
Bangladeshi apparel makers should concentrate on building upon the consumers’ sentiments and preferences on e-commerce and take advantage to build warehousing facilities in the main markets’ hubs and domestically, making use of the existing stocked amount of garment products.
Make the supply chain more transparent and efficient by investing in digitalized systems to better monitor the seasonal variation in production and track and trace practices along the supply chain. But if these two issues along with some other minor issues are properly tackled.
