Cash on delivery is still the default, and that is fine
A large share of online orders in Bangladesh are still paid in cash when the parcel arrives. Customers trust it, it needs no gateway, no verification paperwork and no percentage of each sale, and it works for buyers who have no card and no interest in getting one.
The costs are real but they are operational rather than financial: refused deliveries, returns to pay for, and money that reaches you days after the order. Many sellers run entirely on it for a long time, and a store built properly for cash on delivery is not a compromise.
Mobile wallets are where most online money moves
bKash, Nagad and Rocket are how a great many people pay for things, and for a small seller the simplest version needs no integration at all — you display a number, the customer sends payment, you confirm it against the order.
That manual approach costs nothing to build and is perfectly respectable while volume is low. It stops being sensible when you are matching payments to orders by hand every evening; at that point a proper integration earns its cost by removing the reconciliation, not by looking more professional.
Card gateways cost more than the fee
A payment gateway takes a percentage of every sale, and that percentage is the part people focus on. The parts they do not expect are the setup: business documents, bank account verification, and an approval process measured in weeks rather than days.
There is also a settlement delay — money arrives in your account some days after the customer pays, which matters a great deal if you are buying stock with it.
Rates and requirements change, so confirm current terms directly with a provider rather than trusting any figure you read in an article, this one included. Ask specifically about the per-transaction rate, settlement time, refund handling and whether there is a monthly minimum.
A sensible order to do this in
Most sellers do best starting simple and adding complexity only when the simple version starts to hurt:
- Launch with cash on delivery and a wallet number shown at checkout. Zero fees, zero paperwork, zero waiting.
- Watch where orders actually come from for a month or two. You will usually be surprised.
- When manual reconciliation becomes a chore, integrate the wallet you see most.
- Add a card gateway when you have customers who genuinely cannot pay another way — often that means buyers abroad.
Build it so this decision stays open
The expensive mistake is building a checkout so tightly around one payment method that adding another means rebuilding it. A checkout should treat the payment step as one replaceable piece, so moving from manual confirmation to an integrated gateway is a change to one part rather than a new project.
If you are being quoted for a store, ask what happens when you want to add a payment method later. The answer tells you how it is being built.
Do not let the payment question delay the store. Launch on cash on delivery and a wallet number, learn how your customers actually behave, and add a gateway when the evidence says to — as long as the checkout was built to let you.