Cellbazaar, a Mobile-Based E-Marketplace: Success Factors and Potential for Expansion

In emerging economies, access to accurate market information can be limited by poor, underdeveloped or even absent infrastructure. Countries are poor, partly because markets do not work well and partly because of information problems. Isolated and poorly-informed farmers, traders and businesses cannot participate in commercial exchanges and, even when they do, they tend to have limited bargaining power. Telecommunication service use can ease such limitations (Jensen, 2007) but infrastructural bottlenecks of many kinds can constrain physical access to markets. Even if a farmer has access to timely market prices, if the produce cannot be taken to the market before it perishes, that market information will be useless. In Bangladesh problems such as flooding, frequent electricity outages as well as urban congestion (CKS Consulting, 2009), serve to compound such problems. This is not so only for agricultural markets, but also for the market for second hand goods, services, and other goods.