After that first late-night list, I did something I should probably do more often: I stopped assuming I knew what the problem was, and I went and actually asked.
Over the course of two weeks, I sat down with 12 different store owners and brand managers. Some were running large operations — 300 to 500 orders a day. Some were just starting out, maybe 20 orders a week. I talked to a fashion brand in Dhanmondi, a grocery delivery operation in Uttara, a skincare brand that sells exclusively online, and a homewares business that does both retail and wholesale.
I came with a blank notepad. I asked one question: What makes your day harder than it needs to be?
Here's what I found.
The Problems, Grouped by Where They Hurt
1. Storefront Problems (Losing Customers Before They Even Buy)
Almost everyone mentioned how slow their store was. Pages that take 4–5 seconds to load on mobile. Product images that don't load properly. Category pages that don't filter correctly. One brand owner told me she regularly gets WhatsApp messages from customers saying "your website is not working" — when really it's just slow enough that customers think it's broken.
Several mentioned that their store looks nothing like their brand. They're stuck with a template that was "good enough" when they launched but now feels embarrassing compared to how their physical store looks, or how their competitors' stores look.
2. Checkout Problems (Losing Customers Right When They're Ready to Pay)
This was the most painful cluster. COD orders with no verification — a huge driver of fake orders. No OTP (one-time password) verification on phone numbers, which means customers can enter any number. No saved addresses, so repeat customers have to retype everything every time. Checkout flows with 5 or 6 separate steps when it should be 1.
One merchant told me his abandoned cart rate was over 70%. I wasn't surprised. His checkout required creating an account, verifying an email, then filling in a 12-field address form. In 2025. On mobile.
3. Courier Problems (Losing Money After the Order Is Placed)
Every single person I spoke to mentioned the courier situation. Manual consignment creation, copy-pasting addresses, no fraud check on COD, no tracking visibility, no returns management built into the system. One operations manager told me she had two full-time employees whose only job was to create courier entries manually from the website's order list.
Courier fraud came up repeatedly. Customers who place COD orders with no intention of accepting delivery. Couriers who pocket COD payments. Addresses that are slightly wrong, causing delivery failures and return fees. Nobody had a systematic way to detect or prevent any of this.
4. Inventory Problems (Selling What You Don't Have)
Overselling. Multiple sizes and colours tracked incorrectly. No multi-location inventory — if you have a warehouse in Dhaka and another in Chattogram, there's no unified view. Low stock notifications that trigger too late, or not at all.
5. Staff Problems (Too Many People Doing Manual Work)
This one surprised me with how consistent it was. Almost every business I spoke to had people doing work that should be automated. Address copy-pasting, manually updating order statuses, responding to individual order queries that should be answered automatically by the system. No role separation — the cashier at the POS could see financial reports. The social media manager had full admin access.
6. Marketing Problems (Spending on Ads Without Knowing What Works)
Broken Facebook Pixel tracking. No WhatsApp integration for order confirmations. No abandoned cart recovery. No loyalty programme. No coupon system with proper rules. No referral programme. Basic email templates that look like they were designed in 2012.
What the List Told Me
When I grouped all 23 problems by impact — how much money or time they cost — a clear picture emerged. The biggest losses weren't coming from missing features. They were coming from broken basics: slow stores, leaky checkouts, manual courier processes, and fraud they couldn't detect.
This told me something important about how to prioritize building Manmerce. Get the essentials absolutely right first. Then build the nice-to-haves. In e-commerce, a perfect loyalty programme on top of a broken checkout is meaningless.
Next week: I'll talk about the market itself — how large it actually is, why international platforms keep missing it, and why that gap is the opportunity.
Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.