The Problem
Bangladesh exports billions of dollars a year across garments, jute and natural fibre, leather goods, frozen shrimp, home textiles, and dozens of other categories — and still, finding a real Bangladeshi exporter online is harder than it should be. A buyer's search usually surfaces foreign sourcing agents and intermediary directories long before it reaches the actual factory. On the other side, exporters who'd pass any compliance and quality bar have no digital presence to be found by, because their expertise is manufacturing, not marketing.
The gap was never in the manufacturing. It was in the visibility. Countries like China and India each have a dedicated platform representing their export ecosystem online. Bangladesh, one of the largest exporting nations in the world, didn't. That's the problem Bay X Bengal was built to close.
What I Built
Bay X Bengal is a structured, searchable directory of verified Bangladeshi exporters — not a flat list, but an interconnected system. Industries, product categories, HS Codes, and all 64 districts each have their own dedicated page, and every one of them cross-links, so a buyer can start from a broad industry and narrow down to a specific product, region, or company without ever hitting a dead end.
The data foundation
The primary source is the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) of Bangladesh. Every profile is then enriched by cross-referencing government records like the Labour Inspection Management Application (LIMA), industry bodies like the BGMEA, company websites, Google Business Profiles, and trade databases like the EU REX system — standardised, matched, and merged into a single exporter record. The whole database re-syncs daily, so nothing a buyer sees is stale.
Trust and credibility scoring
A directory is only as useful as a buyer's ability to trust what's in it. Every profile carries a Trust Score — built from compliance records, factory scale, workforce size, export activity, and certifications — and a separate Credibility Score, focused on formal business registrations and verified documentation. The two combine into an overall ranking that determines how exporters are ordered across the platform. Instead of a buyer piecing together credibility signals from five different sources by hand, it's already done for them before they make first contact.
Built to navigate, not just search
The platform is deliberately designed around structured browsing rather than a single search bar. Every exporter card has clickable HS codes, districts, and categories — clicking any of them drops you straight onto a dedicated page for that exact slice of the data. The main listing page adds an industry tab with filterable category pills on top. It's built to feel like exploring a connected ecosystem, not scrolling a results page.
Under the Hood
The frontend runs on Next.js and TypeScript, with Payload CMS as the admin layer for managing thousands of exporter profiles. For the database, I deliberately skipped the usual serverless path — Vercel plus a hosted Postgres like Neon — and self-hosted PostgreSQL on a Hetzner VPS instead, with a custom CI/CD pipeline through Coolify and GitHub. Bay X Bengal is free for every buyer with no paywall, so keeping infrastructure cost proportional to scale, not fixed serverless pricing, was the difference between this being sustainable at 6,000 profiles or not. GA4, Search Console, and Meta Pixel are wired in for full analytics coverage from day one.
The Hardest Problem
None of the above works if the underlying data is inconsistent — and government and public trade sources are never consistent with each other. EPB, LIMA, BGMEA, and EU-REX don't share a common ID system. Company names are spelled differently across each one. Addresses don't match format. The real engineering problem wasn't displaying exporter data, it was building a matching layer that could merge four disagreeing sources into one clean, current profile — daily, automatically, without a human checking every record.
The scoring system had its own version of the same problem: fairness across incomplete data. A company with only EPB data and one with EPB, LIMA, BGMEA, and EU-REX records shouldn't be scored on the same scale, or the smaller, less-documented exporter gets unfairly buried. The scoring model rescales against whichever data points are actually available for a given company, so a factory that's simply missing an EU-REX record isn't penalised as if it were missing quality — it's scored fairly on what's verifiably known about it.
The gap was never in the manufacturing. It was in the visibility.
Results
As of today:
5,937 verified exporters listed, across 19 industries and all 64 districts
8,826 pages indexed by Google
80,000 search impressions and 2,230 clicks in the last 28 days, average search position 8.1
8,000 users and 21,000 pageviews in the last 30 days
121 buyer inquiries submitted directly through the platform
71 exporter profile claim requests
Ranking on page one for terms including Bangladesh garments exporters, Gazipur factory lists, jute mills, shrimp exporters, and Bangladeshi exporters generally
Recognised as a standout project in Third Bracket's UK Prestige Awards 2026 technical assessment
What's Next
Bay X Bengal today is a discovery and verification platform — that's phase one, and it's deliberate; getting the data foundation right came before building anything on top of it.
Phase 1 — Export discovery foundation (current): the core database, industry/category/HS-code/district structure, trust and credibility scoring, organic search visibility.
Phase 2 — Exporter ownership: secure exporter accounts, a self-service dashboard, direct certificate and compliance-document uploads.
Phase 3 — Buyer/exporter messaging: direct communication, centralised inquiry history, lead management.
Phase 4 — Digital product catalogs: full product listings with specs and galleries, expanding from company discovery to product discovery.
Phase 5 — Trade facilitation: sourcing support, order management, and eventually secure payment coordination.
Explore It - or Get in Touch
If you want to see it live: browse verified exporters on Bay X Bengal →
Everything above — the data pipeline, the scoring system, the CMS, the frontend, the SEO — is my own solo build. If you need something built to this standard, I'm available:
Hire me on Upwork → Hire me on Contra →