One year has passed since Anusha Rehman, Minister for State for IT and Telecom, stated that Amazon, Ebay and Paypal would soon be available in Pakistan.
After a year, we still don’t see a chance of that happening.
Despite Pakistan’s inclusion in FATF’s white list, which means that internationally accepted anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing standards are in place, there have been no further updates on the matter.
Other things that were promised – and are no where in sight – include a State Bank spearheaded payment gateway and an e-Commerce framework that addresses consumer rights, dispute resolution and other matters pertaining to the industry.
Amazon, Ebay and Paypal in Pakistan
While Amazon and Ebay could raise our e-commerce standards by miles and would be welcome additions, PayPal is what we need the most.
Just in case if you don’t know, Pakistanis are the fifth largest population for freelancing work in the world, and that too without PayPal which the international standard for online payments. So imagine what could we achieve with PayPal.
Apart from freelance work, PayPal could open countless social and economic opportunities for Pakistani businesses; both online and offline.
And above all, it’s almost 2017 and Pakistan is only country in the world where PayPal doesn’t operate.
Payment Gateway
If not PayPal, Ms. Anusha, can you get us a payment gateway at least? You can’t imagine the amount of business Pakistani companies are losing due to unavailability of an easily configurable / viable payment gateway.
Please don’t tell us that there are some hacks available to receive payments online, we now deserve a fully operational payment gateway of International standards, that is configurable in less than 2 minutes.
E-Commerce Framework
We are also waiting for the E-Commerce Framework that you have been working on — along with E-commerce Ministry — for years now.
A lot has been said on why this framework is important but to put it simply, we are going to lose out on several billion dollars if this is not done right.
Just in case you don’t know, Pakistani consumers don’t have a place to file complaints for any grievances against online stores. FIA isn’t an option because it is clueless on how to deal with online stores since there’s no section in the newly passed Cyber Crimes Law to deal with e-commerce related complaints.
We need to fix this quickly before we lose it all.