In Bangladesh, the majority of e-commerce now happens on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

In Bangladesh, the majority of e-commerce now happens on Facebook

restofworld.org

146 pointsgyre00742 comments

To be clear I know nothing about Bangladesh, but obvious contradictions cast doubt on this piece of reporting.

An obvious one: subtitle says

In Bangladesh, there is no Amazon. There is no eBay. If you want to buy a dress or a crested finch from the comfort of your home, you have to use Facebook.

Then somewhere in the article:

The phenomenon has grown so much over the years that the number of stores on Facebook now eclipse the number of sellers on local e-commerce websites like Evaly, Ajkerdeal, or the Alibaba-acquired Daraz.

It links to this Daraz site, so I checked, and sure enough, there's a women's dresses category: https://www.daraz.com.bd/womens-dresses/ Of course there's no crested finch category, but it's not like you can buy live birds on Amazon or Ebay.

So, there's no Amazon or Ebay, but there are smaller online marketplaces (yes, at least the Daraz site is an online marketplace, it says "open your online store now" on its home page) selling things sold on Amazon and Ebay. How is this qualitatively different, and why does the author try to paint a picture where Facebook login is required (for things that aren't live birds)?

Then there are poorly explained claims like

all an aspiring entrepreneur needs is an internet connection and around $350 to cover startup costs

Why does starting a facebook page/group and accepting cash on delivery cost $350 upfront? <s>Registration/license?</s> (No, "most sellers are not licensed".)

I'm always surprised when garbage articles like these make it to the top of HN. I guess HN is not immune to "i only read the title" kind of threads. And since it sounds like an anti-facebook kind of article, it gets HN's blessing, and off to the top it goes.

There was one more thing you missed that is not explicitly in the article. In virtually any country there are groups on facebook to buy pretty much anything, including live birds. Is Bangladesh really so different?

I'm not sure if you think it's legitimate or not, but one of the effects of upvoting a story on hacker news, is that the thread stays around on the front page, and the discussion grows.

Users can upvote stories either because the story itself or because of the HN discussion thread; and it's often the latter that we come to this site for, isn't it?

Isn't that legtimate, to upvote something if you already like or think you'd like the to read the discussion about it?

Irrelevant note: This story didn't earn my vote.

> I guess HN is not immune to "i only read the title" kind of threads.

It's obviously not, and the effect is often exaggerated when you read the comment section early on: it simply takes more time to read the article and write thoughtful responses than replying to the title immediately with canned talking points.

Calling this a garbage article may be overly uncharitable, but I do put myself on high alert and try not to fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia whenever I read one of these weird-phenomenon-in-unfamiliar-country stories, even when there's no obvious propaganda value behind it, since half of the time I read one about a country I'm actually familiar with, the phenomenon is misunderstood, blown way out of proportions, or sometimes even foreign to local residents.

Luckily, the website provides us with flag & hide features in case you want to pop an article out of your front page or if you want to ask the mods to take a closer look at it.

I think the article and headline are fine for HN. I clicked on it and read it and am not sorry I did. I read the Amazon and Ebay comment to mean just that! There are no other juggernaut e-commerce sites that have dominated the market, not that there are NO other e-commerce sites.

I find that Facebook has managed to fill the void without explicitly being an e-commerce site interesting.

A Bangladeshi here. Let me make something clear first:

- Facebook doesn't handle the transactions (yet), some mobile banking is used for transactions.

- Facebook works because you can sponsor a video of your product explaining the condition and people are very skeptic here about things, so video works, pictures like amazon don't.

- It's still a developing country and people like offers and facebook reaches bigger audience/customers.

- People do comment on Facebook, great for honest product reviews.

One might think of Bangladesh's GDP and think things are good. To be honest things are better than before but that GDP amount is inflated by the riches. We're still an agricultural country starting to make our way through the intellect based economy.

Hope that helps.

In a way it's definitely fascinating to see how enterprising people have taken advantage of available resources to set up business ventures

But I can't deny it's all a little concerning. The stuff about exploiting animals, insecurities (the fairness cream stuff), skirting government regulations (wonder what led to the credit card restrictions) etc. Then again, I can't pretend to know about the life of a Bangladeshi so though I may silently judge, I admit it is borne of ignorance

I'm unaware of the local startup scene but I hope in a similar vein to Flipkart in India, someone starts a way for these people to move away from the controlling influence of Facebook and sell on more regulated spaces

One interesting advantage that I didn't see mentioned in the article is that Facebook data is often included for free in mobile phone plans, or as part of a "Social Media" package that's cheaper than other data.

This is true in parts of Africa I live and visit. Network providers sell data bundles specifically for Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter. These social media data bundles are way cheaper than "normal" data which enables you to visit the "Internet". So much news and business networking happens on Whatsapp you might as well call WhatsApp and Facebook the internet for most people in these countries.

Yep, I have a lot of friends in the Philippines who I chat with on Facebook. Many of them, probably a large majority, don't have email or internet access on their phones apart from that. It's a free deal that comes with the phone.

Reminds me that we used to have something similar in France a long time ago. Some websites came for free with your mobile plan. I think it was whatsapp and fb too?

We must put an end to gatekeeping behavior.

The free market has its flaws but having your market (or your entire economy!) regulated by a large corporation really is the worst of both worlds.

Facebook is the only opportunity at being market participants these people have, with its incredible low barrier to entry.

The word 'regulation' implies some sort of rather severe punishment if you disregard it. Technically speaking I don't think there is a law (or regulation, either) on the books on my country so minor that I couldn't theoretically get arrested or have all my assets taken away from me if I absolutely, publicly, and persistently refuse to follow it. Even practically speaking, I'm not sure how far disobediance can be pushed. Not far, I suspect, on an individual level.

Facebook doesn't have anywhere near the power of a regulator. Not even the same conversation. No link at all. If the best deal isn't on Facebook people will go elsewhere.

> If the best deal isn't on Facebook people will go elsewhere.

But do they? Or do they just find the best deal on facebook, and then select that deal? In which case, you end up with defacto regulation by facebook because if they choose to remove your deal, you are effectively being regulated by hidden rules you have no control over.

> But do they?

Wikipedia tells me the per-capita GDP of Bangladesh is ~$2,173.

Yes, they do. They aren't sitting around thinking "welp, I've got so much money I'll just give up on shopping around". That attitude is a luxury for people with 5 figure incomes.

Maybe wealthy Bangladeshians don't bother. My heart bleeds for them and the bad deal they just accepted.

i dont see how fb is a gatekeeper here. they have a product that is better than all the other freemarket alternatives for these people... no gatekeeping, no regulations forcing people to use fb

Unless something drastically changes with trade agreements we’re likely well beyond being able to regulate these multinationals in any broadly useful way.

That's actually the exact opposite of what's happening.

Facebook enables people with little knowledge of e-commerce to just open a shop with a few clicks. All the selling happens in messages.

What's your proposed alternative? Some government-sponsored app that has the same features as Facebook? Cool. Try that and let me know how it goes in Bangladesh.

If it wasn't Facebook, it would be some other large centralized system.

Maybe it would be India-based, or China-based, though.

Huh apparently all I need to do to justify literally any business model a) have a small mountain of cash and b) make it convenient. People will just give up on trying to imagine a way to do things better. Why bother when I already do things as well as anyone can imagine?

Making a business transaction convenient typically involves a process of imagining a way to do things better.

Does it? Not from my experience on either side of the transaction.... in my eyes all of the “innovation” facebook has produced (along with every other large tech company) has been straightforward, by the book scaling of extant business processes with technology.

Anyway if there’s a process it can hardly be called imagination now can it? It’s just human-level algorithms fed by cash.

If you can’t imagine how to improve this you’re certainly lacking for either observational skill or bound by some dogmatic worldview.

there is no gatekeeping, facebook is just solving a distribution problem for many ecommerce owners and as a store owner i have to say it’s the most cost effective ways to reach customers

In China wechat serves a similar role, especially in rural areas. You can pick up fresh veggies and meat directly from farmers on wechat, it's like a virtual bazaar.

There's a staggering amount of endangered wildlife trade occurring openly on facebook in developing countries. Monitoring groups have a tough time breaking into these things due to the gated nature of the platform and after that paranoid private groups.

Do hope FB one day tries to take this seriously as they are the only people who can realistically access this content completely, law enforcement is more reactionary than proactive on these events and tend to miss the small windows of opportunity, there's plenty of people happy to offer up tooling for autodetection of illegal wildlife trade activities.

Fellow bangladeshi here. Its been very interesting to see the comments on this post and it gives me lots to think about.

I will say, having operated these facebook based businesses, it is literally the worst and I can't wait for something else to take its place.

I think that this is extremely bad to rely on large corporation lik FB to control the economy.

But,i also think that it is not the mistake of people because they are forced to sell like this by society.

Imagine selling items to people on Unknown Social Media Platform in Bangladesh. Is it possible? No, because people are not using it. FB is popular for selling because, society uses it more than other platforms in Bangladesh.

So,some other third party E-Mart company(other than FB) probably of their country should notice it and solve the platform. Government's help can also be of great use.

Power is ability to make people do what you want. It can be measured in money. Facebook has lots of it, like it or not.

The article falsifies your assumption about Facebook’s strategy and tactics in Bangladesh:

> The wording was intended to circumvent a Facebook algorithm that, to prevent wildlife trafficking, automatically takes down posts with “buy” or “sell” in the description.

That's because Facebook obviously does not care. They remove the "buy" or "sell" posts due to laws, not because they themselves have issues with wildlife trafficking.

If FB did care, they'd not have a problem shutting it down until you have to go into really obscure code to pass by their systems, at which point it gets useless, because that code isn't known by the other side.

> That's because Facebook obviously does not care.

I seem to lack the ability to see what you find obvious. Perhaps we differ in what counts as supporting evidence or maybe our starting assumptions are drastically different.

Do you believe that Facebook is capable of adding a similar filter to match "to change hands"? If they were capable, what could the explanation be for why they don't?

Because there are many, many langauges and idioms in the world, and AI isn't good enough to do this accurately at the moment.

Given that Bangladesh is pretty poor and small, the likelihood is that if they were to pour resources into it, eventually the business would pull out of the country, as it wouldn't be profitable.

Note that if they block to change hands, then people will start using another idiom, so a mere filter isn't going to accomplish much here.

It's certainly a cat-and-mouse-game until you've added the obvious idioms, but that only lasts a few iterations, because the users will quickly have to come up with new ones that get less useful as their understanding gets less wide-spread. It's one of those situations where you can absolutely win by and large, even if you don't catch everything. If you catch 95-99%, you're done.

Bangladesh has a population of 160m, and almost all speak Bengali, which is also used in India by a significant minority. It's not like we're talking about ignoring Liechtenstein. It won't eat up the profits by having someone add 10 rules to a filter list for a target audience of 200m+, even if they are poor.

In Poland people use wording such as "won't sell" or "won't buy" for selling and buying stuff on facebook that cannot be traded there legally.

Bangladesh may be poor but it certainly isn't small. It's the eighth most populous country!

Apologies, I (unconsciously, I guess) weighted by advertising revenue in my head.

I should probably stop doing that.

e-commerce via social media terrifies me because

1. my buying history is an unfair advantage for ads that want to burrow into my brain

2. payment processors can make money without selling data!

businesses should have to pick 'paid or free' and not share behavioral data across that wall

'F-commerce' is right

FWIW, Alibaba is also a player in Bangladesh.

what am I supposed to do with this information?!

that is obviously horrible.

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