Freelance, the Chattogram reality
Hiring a freelance ecommerce developer in Chittagong without getting ghosted
Most Chattogram sellers are nervous about hiring a freelance ecommerce developer in Chittagong. The worry is not the price. It is the ghosting. You have heard the story, or lived it. A freelancer from Facebook or Fiverr takes 50% up front and sends two screenshots. Then he goes quiet. The replies get slower, and the demo link never quite works.
Three weeks later, you are chasing a person who has moved on to the next gig. That is the real fear behind this search. Any honest answer has to start by naming it, not by pretending it does not happen.
Here is how I work against that. I take one store at a time, so I am not juggling your build behind five others. The design goes on Figma first. You sign it off before I touch a line of WooCommerce. That is the design-approval guarantee. You see exactly what you are paying for before your money is at risk on code.
Payment is 50% advance and 50% on launch day. So I am not paid in full until the store is live and you have logged into your own admin. A freelancer who wanted to vanish would never agree to that. He would not wait for half the money until the thing actually works.
Chattogram trade has its own shape, and the store has to fit it. A lot of what sells here comes in through the port. Think electronics from the Reazuddin Bazar supply chain. Think clothing and home items that a reseller in Agrabad, GEC or Khulshi flips on Facebook. Most of them sell there long before they think about a website.
Buyers here haggle harder than in Dhaka. The first question is always koto taka. Almost everyone pays cash on delivery or bKash on delivery, not by card. A freelancer who only built simple sites for Dhaka startups will hand you the wrong checkout. It assumes a credit card and a buyer who does not haggle. I build for the city that is actually paying you.
And I am truly a freelancer, not an agency in disguise. The person you ask koto taka is the person who draws your homepage and writes your checkout. No junior quietly does the build while someone senior bills for it. I have about five years of shipping stores for Bangladeshi sellers. That includes the import and resell crowd Chattogram runs on. So I know where these stores leak orders.
If your budget is honestly under 50,000 BDT, I will tell you to stay on Facebook plus bKash and save up first. A freelancer chasing every taka would take the job and cut corners. I would rather you come back when the store can be done right.
See pricing in BDT