ORBIX (internal venture)

Shipped a Shopify-class e-commerce platform with first-class local payment integrations for South Asian SMBs.

ORBIX — local-payment-first e-commerce platform

Services
Web Development, Brand Identity, Digital Marketing
Timeline
8-week MVP, ongoing platform development
Year
2021–present
Role
Founder + Engineering lead
Team size
5 (3 engineers, 1 designer, 1 ops)

The Challenge

What needed solving.

Bangladeshi SMBs were churning off Shopify because the per-month + per-transaction stack didn't work at their margins, and local payment options (bKash, Nagad, SSLCommerz) were either missing or buggy.

The opportunity wasn't a Shopify clone with a different brand — it was an e-commerce platform built local-payment-first, with pricing that reflected BD/India SMB economics rather than US SaaS economics.

The Approach

Four-step playbook for this engagement.

Step 1
Local payments as the wedge
Started by being the best local-payment integration available, even before we had a full platform. Won merchants on payment alone, then expanded into the full stack.
Step 2
Bangla + English first-class
Storefront and admin both fully bilingual from day one. Most platforms treat localization as an add-on; we treated it as a core constraint.
Step 3
Pricing for SMB reality
Modeled merchant economics with real BD/India unit costs. Pricing tiers that work for a small artisan as well as a 50-SKU brand. No surprise per-transaction fees that punish growth.
Step 4
Modular platform architecture
Built around a thin core with optional modules — payments, shipping, marketing — so smaller merchants don't pay for what they don't use.