ShopUp

About ShopUp

ShopUp is a platform built to bring small, offline retail shops into the digital economy, now Bangladesh's largest B2B commerce platform for small businesses. Ataur Rahim Chowdhury co-founded the company in 2017 alongside Afeef Zaman, who serves as CEO of the wider ShopUp group, bringing an engineering background rather than a retail one to how the platform was built from the start.

The company set out to solve a problem specific to Bangladesh's retail landscape: hundreds of thousands of small shops were already selling through Facebook pages, but had no organized way to manage inventory, orders, or logistics behind that storefront.

An Engineer Before a Founder

Ataur Rahim Chowdhury studied Computer Science and Engineering at East West University, graduating in 2012, and worked as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant there while completing his degree. He then worked as a Programmer at iTechnoLab before spending several years as a Full Stack Developer at Ice9 Interactive, from January 2012 to December 2015.

In early 2016, he consulted as a Software Engineer for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, work that took his engineering skills into a very different, mission-driven context before he returned to building consumer technology. That stretch of humanitarian-sector work gave him experience designing systems for users operating under real constraints, a background that turned out to be more relevant to Bangladesh's informal retail sector than a typical consumer tech career would have been.

Building Conversational Commerce for Existing Sellers

ShopUp built conversational commerce bots and backend tools that plugged directly into sellers' existing social media pages, rather than asking shop owners to migrate to an entirely new platform. That decision, meeting sellers where they already operated rather than demanding they adopt new behavior, shaped the platform's early adoption among Bangladesh's informal retail sector.

As Co-Founder and CTO in ShopUp's early years, Ataur Rahim Chowdhury was responsible for the technical architecture that let the platform automate logistics and manage seller inventory and orders at scale. That infrastructure now underpins a network collectively reaching more than 31 million people through the small businesses it serves.

Solving a Messy, Informal Problem

The technical challenge wasn't building commerce software in the abstract. It was building it to work inside the messy, informal way Bangladeshi retail already operated on social media, a constraint that shaped nearly every architectural decision the engineering team made in ShopUp's early years, from how orders were captured to how payments and deliveries were reconciled after the fact.

From CTO to CEO of Bangladesh Operations

When ShopUp merged with Sary, a Saudi Arabia-based B2B commerce company, to form SILQ Group, Ataur Rahim Chowdhury took on the role of CEO for ShopUp's Bangladesh operations. That shift moved him from a purely technical leadership role into running the country business end to end, at a point when the merged entity was operating across multiple markets.

Mentoring the Next Generation

Beyond his operating role, Ataur Rahim Chowdhury has been vocal about mentoring the next generation of product leaders coming up in Bangladesh's tech industry. Having built ShopUp's technology from the ground up himself, he has positioned much of his post-merger focus around developing the product and engineering talent that will carry the platform forward.

Where ShopUp Stands Today

Nearly a decade after its 2017 founding, ShopUp remains the clearest example in Bangladesh of B2B commerce technology built specifically for informal retail rather than adapted from a Western e-commerce template. Employee reviews reflect the pressures of scaling quickly following the SILQ Group merger, with work-life balance rated notably lower in Dhaka than across the wider group, a tension common to fast-growing platforms expanding into new markets.

Products

ShopUp's platform covers inventory, ordering, credit, and logistics tools for small retail shops rather than a single consumer-facing product.

Conversational Commerce Tools let small shop owners manage orders and customer interactions directly through their existing Facebook storefronts.

Inventory and Order Management provides backend tools for tracking stock and processing orders at a scale most individual shop owners couldn't manage manually.

Supply Chain and Logistics connects small retailers to suppliers and delivery infrastructure, extending ShopUp's platform beyond software into physical fulfillment.

Credit and Financing gives small shop owners access to working capital based on their sales history on the platform, an extension of ShopUp's core commerce data into financial services.

Across conversational commerce, inventory management, logistics, and credit, ShopUp's platform reflects the same mission that built the company in 2017: bringing Bangladesh's informal retail sector into a connected digital supply chain, now reaching more than 31 million people through the shops it serves.