Karim bhai opens his small grocery shop at seven in the morning. Before his first customer walks in, he is already worried. His stocks of cooking oil are running low. His biscuit shelf is half empty. He needs to restock, but that means he needs to close the shutter and move hastily to Karwan Bazar for one thing and Begum Bazar for another, haggling with different wholesalers and carrying everything back himself. This is not just a bad week for Karim bhai. This is the scene of every week.

Karim bhai is not alone. There are over five million small shops like his across Bangladesh. Almost every one of them runs the same routine, week after week, not because they want to, but because there is simply no other way.

Travel to India or Indonesia, and the story looks completely different. Small shop owners there place orders from their phones without leaving their shops. The stock arrives the next morning. No travel, no haggling, no wasted hours. So what is the gap between them and us?

The way things work in Bangladesh

If you want to understand distribution in Bangladesh, picture a long chain. A product leaves a factory, goes to a national distributor, then a regional one, then a local wholesaler and only then reaches the small shop.

Each step adds its own cost. By the time the product reaches Karim bhai, the price has spiked up four or five times, and he has no way of knowing if he is getting a fair deal.

Think about it this way. A bottle of cooking oil leaves the factory at 100 taka. The national distributor adds 8 taka. The regional one adds 7. The local wholesaler adds 10. Karim bhai buys it for 125 taka and sells it for 128. His profit? 3 taka per bottle. And he traveled an hour each way just to get it.

Credit is another headache. Banks want documents and guarantees that most small shop owners simply do not have. Wholesalers sometimes give credit but only to people they already know, and always at higher prices. A shop owner who needs 10,000 taka worth of goods but only has 6,000 in hand has very few good options.

Now look at what happened in India

India’s small shops, called kirana stores, faced the exact same problems not long ago. 150K+ Kirana stores, each doing its own weekly market trip, each stuck in the same long chain of middlemen, each struggling to get credit.

Then something changed. A platform called Udaan came in and did one simple thing: it let small shop owners buy from hundreds of brands in one place, get stock delivered to their door and get credit if they needed it without visiting a single wholesale market.

Picture Ravi, who runs a kirana store in Mumbai. He opens his shop at seven. His oil is running low. He taps a button on the Udaan app and places the order. It will arrive tomorrow morning, directly at his shop. He did not travel anywhere. He did not close the shop. He went back to serving his customers.

In 2024, Udaan’s daily buyers grew by 70 percent. It cut out the unnecessary steps in the chain, brought prices down and gave shop owners something they had not had in years: their time back. Time to be in the shop, to know their customers, to actually run their business.

Here is what that looks like when you put Bangladesh and India side by side. A small shop in Bangladesh has to make 3 to 5 trips to wholesale markets every week, can rarely order from one place, and almost never gets credit easily. A kirana store in India makes zero to one trips a week, orders everything from one app, and gets same-day credit approval. Same kind of shop. A completely different experience.

Indonesia is not far behind

In Indonesia, small shop owners now order goods directly from suppliers through their phones. Payment apps like GoPay made paying without cash completely normal. A shop owner who used to depend on whoever showed up with a van now has real choices.

A shop owner in Jakarta orders her weekly supplies before breakfast, pays through her phone, and gets a delivery at the shop door by afternoon. She never left the building.

What both India and Indonesia figured out is simple: if you make it easier for small shops to get their stock, those shops grow. When those shops grow, the people around them do better too. More products on the shelf means more customers coming in. More customers means a better income. A better income means a better life. The small shop is not a side issue; it is the main thing.

So what is changing in Bangladesh?

The good news is that Bangladesh is not standing still. For the first time, platforms are being built here that do what Udaan did in India: connect small shop owners directly to suppliers, cut out the unnecessary steps, and bring the whole ordering process to a phone screen.

PriyoShop is one of those platforms. It was built because someone looked at Karim bhai’s situation and millions like him and asked a simple question: why does he still have to do all of this himself, in 2026, with a smartphone in his pocket? Why can he not just order from one place, at fair prices, and get it delivered? And slowly, those same numbers that separated Bangladesh from India are starting to shift. Trips to the market are coming down. Credit is becoming available. Five million shop owners now have one app instead of five different markets to deal with.

Now picture Karim bhai one year from now. He opens his shop at seven. Oil is running low. Biscuits need restocking. He opens PriyoShop, places an order, and puts his phone back in his pocket. His first customer walks in. He is there to serve them. Tomorrow morning, the delivery will come to him.

This is already happening for thousands of small shops using PriyoShop today. Unilever is also rolling out its own platform in Bangladesh right now, connecting retailers directly to products without five layers of middlemen. The direction is clear.

What Bangladesh has going for it

Five million small shops means the market for better distribution is bigger here than in most countries in Asia. bKash and Nagad have already put digital payments on almost every phone in the country. Young shop owners who grew up with smartphones are ready to order online. And districts beyond Dhaka, smaller towns and villages, are where the biggest opportunity sits, just like the growth that came from smaller towns in India and Indonesia.

Both India and Indonesia agree on one thing: none of this happened by itself. Someone has to build the roads. Someone has to tell the small shop owner you do not have to keep doing it the old way. That is the work being done in Bangladesh right now by platforms, by companies, and by people who believe the small shop deserves better.

The point of all of this

Karim bhai’s shop has been there for twelve years. He knows every customer by name. He is good at running a shop. What no one should have to be good at is spending half the week traveling to wholesale markets just to keep the shelves full.

India solved this. Indonesia solved this. Bangladesh is now building the solution. The gap between a shop owner here and one in Mumbai is not about how hard they work. They both work just as hard, and they both want the same things: a full shelf, a steady income, more time with their family. The only difference is the tools they have access to.

Giving Karim bhai those tools is not charity. It is just common sense. When small shops do better, the whole country does better. And that is the road Bangladesh is starting to walk.