Last-Mile Delivery Challenges in Bangladesh's E-Commerce Industry: A systematic Literature Review

Abstract

In highly digitalizing South Asian markets, last mile delivery (LMD) is the most expensive, complex and customer facing part of the ecommerce supply chain. Current study is a systematic literature review of academic and grey literature covering the challenges of last mile delivery in e-commerce in Bangladesh from 2010-2026. A multi-source search using combinations of the terms “last-mile delivery”, “e-commerce”, “logistics”, “gig economy” and “Bangladesh” was undertaken with the assistance of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA 2020) framework. Given the limited number of indexed, peer-reviewed scholarship on the last-mile logistics specifically for the Bangladesh context, the review included a mix of peer-reviewed studies and high-quality institutional reports, regulatory documents and industry analyses – a hybrid approach recommended for systematic reviews of practice-driven and under-theorized topics in emerging markets. Of these, about 125 unique records were included in the thematic synthesis based on topical relevance, language eligibility and date (2010-2026), resulting in the retention of 46 sources. The review identified that there are eight interrelated thematic clusters of challenge: (1) infrastructural and geographic constraints; (2) urban traffic congestion and its economic cost; (3) cash-on-delivery dependency and payment friction; (4) consumer trust and service-quality gaps; (5) precarious gig-economy labor conditions; (6) reverse logistics and product-return burdens; (7) nascent technology-enabled innovation (micro-warehousing, parcel lockers, route optimization); and (8) a persistent rural–urban delivery divide that constrains market expansion beyond Dhaka. This study is an important step towards synthesizing two decades of disjointed academic, industry and labor-based research on the last-mile delivery system in Bangladesh, and is a research blueprint for tackling the most significant empirical challenges facing the sector.