Tens of thousands of Facebook-based F-commerce sellers were not pleased with the return of mobile internet on Sunday. These sellers rely on Facebook to market their products and services.
The concerns of F-commerce owners grew as the country’s Meta services, which include Facebook, had not yet been restored following a 10-day outage of mobile internet and the main social media network.
“All sorts of online commerce have already resumed, except for us. I do not know how long I have to wait for the next order,” said a bachelor student in the capital running his F-commerce business of apparel and wearable accessories.
“I have an employee whom I have to pay every day and I cannot ditch him at this tough time,” he said, adding that prior to the internet and social media outage from 18th July he had a daily revenue of Taka 4-5 thousand that dropped to zero as the virtual shop on Facebook became inaccessible to all from Bangladesh.
The authorities are unsure of the precise number of internet merchants who are experiencing similar hardships as the young business owners.
However, estimations from the E-commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB) indicate that Facebook, the most popular social media site in the nation, has over 5 lakh company pages in Bangladesh.
“Not all the pages are by Facebook-only online sellers as Omni channel businesses also present there,” said its executive director Jahangir Alam Shovon.
He estimates that between 2 and 2.5 lakh pages are managed by F-commerce entrepreneurs, with an additional 60,000 of them producing consistent revenue.
However, participants in the online commerce ecosystem think there may have been a significantly higher number of active Facebook vendors.
To support their operations and deliveries, the majority of the 2-2.5 lakh social media sellers make sales every week, according to Fahim Mashroor, the founder of BD Jobs, AjkerDeal, and Delivery Tiger, who told the local media that he believes the active F-commerce sellers have indirectly created a million jobs in the economy.
Approximately 2 lakh F-commerce businesses are registered as clients of two elite smart logistics companies that pick and distribute e-commerce packages throughout the nation.
Mashroor, also a former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, said if the sales losses continue the small businesses will become sick and the number of affected would not be small at all.
Some Facebook groups, onboarding hundreds of online traders, help them generate sales.
