Bangladesh's Chorka faces difficulties in exploring e-business opportunities

"Chorka" known as Bangladesh's first online supermarket is facing difficulties in exploring e-business opportunities due to absence of a proper payment method. As a result it can conduct transactions only by international credit cards. There is no a surprise that identity crisis touched the company. It is more vulnerable to online fraud because Bangladesh does not have any definition of e-business in its policy guidelines.

The online supermarket conducted around 1000 transactions since its inception on September 02, 2008. And according to the company executives it is a good result.

However, Khandaker Anwar, one of the directors of Chorka, considers that the results could be better and the trade might be multiplied if the government allowed the local banks' credit or debit cards in online transactions. The company is facing problems in remitting money from its US account as Bangladesh Bank and other commercial banks do not have any option for e-commerce business. The financial issue is when the company remitted money from USA to Bangladesh it had to face various difficulties in getting clearances. And the country does not have any definition of e-business and faces problems even in opening a bank account for the company. When asked about the matter, a high official of Bangladesh Bank said the government has initiated a move to set a policy for such online transaction, and a high level committee comprising officials from Chief Adviser's Office, Bangladesh Bank, National Board of Revenue and commercial banks is working. The committee has already placed some suggestions to the cell concerned at the Chief Adviser's Office to immediately open an international online transaction gateway. But it seems that the company will achieve its first goal is to make the name of the company familiar to the customers across the world as it registered 40,000 hits from 80 countries during the period among which 55 percent hits were from NRBs. Among the NRBs, 75 percent visitors were from USA.