I remember the night clearly. It was late — maybe 1am — and I was on a call with a client who runs a clothing brand. He was furious. His store had gone down during a weekend sale. Orders were stuck. Payments were failing. His courier API had stopped responding. He had a team of 8 people doing nothing because the system had collapsed.
That night I made a list. Not of bugs to fix or features to build — just a list of everything that was broken about how online stores work in Bangladesh. I expected 8 or 10 items. I ended up with 23.
That list became Manmerce.
What's Actually Broken
Here's the thing: there's no shortage of e-commerce platforms. Shopify is brilliant. WooCommerce powers half the internet. BigCommerce, Magento, OpenCart — you've got options. But every single one of them is built for a world that looks nothing like the Bangladeshi market.
Let me give you a specific example. Payment methods. In Bangladesh, more than 60% of online orders are paid by Cash on Delivery (COD). The customer places an order, and pays the delivery person in cash when the package arrives. Shopify's checkout is designed for card payments. The COD experience — when available — is bolted on as an afterthought. It doesn't have fraud detection. It doesn't have confirmation call workflows. It doesn't understand that COD and card are fundamentally different business processes.
Or take courier integrations. Pathao, Steadfast, Redx, Paperfly — these are the couriers that actually move packages in Bangladesh. None of the international platforms natively connect to them. Merchants end up manually copying order addresses into the courier's own dashboard, one by one, hundreds of times a day. I've watched a team of 3 people spend their entire day doing nothing but copy-pasting addresses. That's not a business — that's a data entry operation.
The Moment I Decided
Somewhere around item 15 on my list — "no support for Bangla language in product descriptions" — I stopped and asked myself: why am I helping clients patch these problems one at a time? Why doesn't something exist that solves all of them together?
The answer, I think, is that the people building the big platforms are not in the market. They're building for a global average that doesn't include us. And the people who are in the market — local developers — are building solutions that work for one client, not for everyone.
I'm an engineer. I've spent years building software for businesses here. I understand both sides: I understand how to build a system correctly, and I understand what these businesses actually need. That combination is rare. And it felt like a responsibility.
Why Engineer-Built Is Different
A business person building an e-commerce platform will design it around what they can sell. An engineer building one will design it around what won't break at 2am. Those are very different priorities.
When I build a system, I'm thinking about: what happens when two customers try to buy the last unit of a product at the exact same moment? What happens when the payment gateway goes down mid-checkout? What happens when the courier's server is slow and my API is waiting for a response?
These edge cases aren't exciting to talk about. But they're the difference between a store that runs smoothly and one that loses ৳50,000 in a bad evening because something nobody anticipated went wrong.
So I started building Manmerce with that question always in the background: what breaks this, and how do we prevent it?
What This Series Is About
Over the next 34 weeks, I'm going to document the entire journey of building Manmerce. Not the code — you don't need to see that. But the thinking. The decisions. The things I tried that didn't work. The moments where I had to choose between two equally uncomfortable options.
I'm writing this for store owners, brand founders, and entrepreneurs — people who don't write code but want to understand the product they're considering running their business on. I want you to know how it was built, why certain decisions were made, and what that means for you as someone who will depend on it.
And if you happen to be an engineer reading this — welcome. I think you'll recognize the decisions even if I'm explaining them without diagrams.
Next week: I'll share the full list. Every problem I identified, categorised by how much they hurt real businesses, and why they went on the roadmap.
Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.