B2B marketplace platform empowering women entrepreneurs with World Bank support

The Need

The SME Foundation (SMEF), with funding from the World Bank, recognized a critical gap in market access for women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh.

Despite having quality products and services, women-led small and medium enterprises struggled to connect with institutional buyers and showcase their offerings on a global stage.

SMEF needed a comprehensive digital marketplace that could empower these women entrepreneurs by enabling supplier registration, professional profile creation, and product showcasing capabilities.

The platform needed to serve a dual purpose—providing women suppliers with the tools to present their businesses professionally while offering buyers and large institutions a secure online portal to browse, search, and interact with suppliers globally.

The goal was to create an inclusive B2B ecosystem that would break down traditional barriers to market access and enable women entrepreneurs to compete in institutional procurement and international trade.

The Solution

We developed a comprehensive Supplier Marketplace platform that has become a transformative tool for women's economic empowerment in Bangladesh, funded by the World Bank and built specifically for SMEF's mission.The World Bank-Funded eMarketplace creates a dedicated digital space where women entrepreneurs can showcase and sell their products globally.

The platform provides sophisticated supplier registration and onboarding workflows that guide women business owners through creating comprehensive profiles highlighting their capabilities, certifications, product catalogs, and business credentials.

This professional presentation levels the playing field, allowing women-led SMEs to compete for opportunities they previously couldn't access.The Supplier-Buyer Platform functions as a complete end-to-end B2B system that facilitates connections between suppliers and institutional buyers.

Women entrepreneurs create detailed supplier profiles showcasing their products, services, certifications, and business history.

Institutional buyers—including corporations, government agencies, and international organizations—gain access to browse verified suppliers, use advanced search tools to find specific capabilities or products, and initiate business relationships.

The platform's search functionality allows buyers to filter by industry, product category, certification status, location, and other criteria, ensuring they can efficiently discover suppliers that meet their procurement requirements.

We built a robust Admin CMS & Data Migration system with a custom backend that provides SMEF administrators with complete control over content management, user administration, reporting, and analytics.

A critical component was migrating scanned supplier records from legacy systems into the new digital platform, ensuring historical data and existing supplier relationships were preserved while transitioning to the modern system.

The admin panel provides comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowing SMEF to track supplier onboarding, buyer engagement, transaction activity, and measure the program's impact on women's economic participation.

The measurable impact has been substantial: the platform has successfully onboarded over 12,000 women-led SMEs and facilitated more than $6.8 million in completed transactions, demonstrating how digital infrastructure can create genuine economic opportunities and drive inclusive growth.

The Challenge

The primary challenge was designing a platform that could serve two distinct user groups with different needs and capabilities. Women entrepreneurs often have varying levels of digital literacy and business experience, so the supplier onboarding and profile creation process needed to be intuitive and supportive, guiding users through presenting their businesses professionally without overwhelming them with complexity.

For institutional buyers, the platform needed sophisticated search and filtering capabilities to efficiently discover suppliers meeting specific procurement criteria among thousands of profiles.

Building advanced search tools that could handle complex queries across multiple parameters while maintaining fast performance required careful database design and optimization.

Data migration from scanned supplier records presented significant technical challenges. Legacy information existed in non-standardized formats, requiring intelligent processing to extract, validate, and structure data into the new system while maintaining accuracy and completeness. Ensuring data quality during migration was critical, as incorrect supplier information could undermine trust in the platform.

Creating a secure online portal that could facilitate global B2B interactions required robust security measures, including user authentication, data encryption, and access controls. The platform needed to protect sensitive business information while enabling transparency and discovery.

Additionally, building reporting and analytics capabilities that could measure program impact and provide insights for SMEF's continuous improvement required thoughtful data architecture and dashboard design.

Scaling the platform to support 12,000+ women-led SMEs while maintaining performance, facilitating millions of dollars in transactions, and ensuring reliability for both suppliers and institutional buyers required infrastructure capable of handling significant concurrent usage and transaction volumes.

The Partnership

Our collaboration with SMEF and the World Bank was driven by a shared commitment to women's economic empowerment and inclusive development. We worked closely with SMEF's team to understand the specific challenges women entrepreneurs face in accessing institutional markets and designed every feature to address those barriers.

The partnership involved extensive consultation with women business owners to understand their needs, capabilities, and the types of support that would genuinely help them compete for larger opportunities.

We designed user-friendly onboarding workflows and profile creation tools that guide suppliers through presenting their businesses professionally, while ensuring the process remained accessible to entrepreneurs with varying levels of digital experience.

We collaborated with institutional buyers to understand their procurement processes and supplier discovery needs, ensuring the platform's search and filtering capabilities would genuinely streamline their sourcing activities.

The secure online portal we built facilitates global interactions while maintaining the trust and security essential for B2B relationships.

Our team managed the complex data migration from scanned legacy records, implementing quality assurance processes to ensure accuracy. We also provided comprehensive training to SMEF staff on using the admin CMS for content management, user control, and reporting, ensuring they could independently manage and grow the platform.

The measurable success—onboarding 12,000+ women-led SMEs and facilitating $6.8M+ in transactions—demonstrates how this collaborative approach created a digital platform that drives genuine economic opportunity and demonstrates the power of technology to advance inclusive development goals.

The Tech Stack

We built the platform using PHP Laravel, Vue.js, and MySQL to create a modern, responsive B2B marketplace with comprehensive management capabilities. Laravel provides the robust backend framework for handling complex business logic, user authentication, and data management across supplier and buyer interactions.

Vue.js powers the dynamic, interactive frontend that delivers smooth user experiences for both supplier profile creation and buyer search activities. MySQL ensures reliable data management for thousands of supplier profiles, product catalogs, transaction records, and user interactions.

This technology combination includes a custom CMS for content and user administration, advanced search capabilities that enable institutional buyers to efficiently discover suppliers across multiple criteria, user management systems for both suppliers and buyers, and secure administrative reporting modules that provide SMEF with insights into platform usage, supplier onboarding trends, transaction activity, and program impact—supporting the platform's mission of empowering women entrepreneurs and facilitating global B2B connections.