PayPal's indifference to Pakistani e-commerce market

Anyone in Pakistan familiar with e-commerce knows the fact that Pakistan is a non-preferred country for most of the payment processors and other online businesses. As a result, running an e-commerce business in Pakistan is so expensive and full of hurdles that it becomes a distant dream for anyone wishing to start a new online business.

This even affects the large workforce of computer programmers and website designers finding freelance work, because most of the major freelance websites prefer PayPal for payments.

One such payment provider that does not bother to include Pakistan in the list of countries eligible for sign up, even for the most basic services, is PayPal. For most Pakistanis, the fact that war torn countries like Eritrea and Ethiopia are included in PayPal's list where Pakistan is not, is simply unbelievable.

The reasons are still unknown. Some say it is because of fears of fraud, but given the number of online fraud incidents compared to the number of credit and debit card users, this can not be a valid reason. But what is clearly known is that the people at PayPal do not realize the true e-commerce potential existing in Pakistan.

Pakistan is home to a large e-commerce base with a large number of credit card users, larger than most of the countries of Europe where PayPal is available. Pakistan has a significant workforce of I.T. graduates contributing to the international software industry.

On the financial side, Pakistan has a fully developed banking sector with most of the banks providing online banking and other advanced electronic services.

Despite all that, thousands of freelance workers and small sized businesses are deprived of an opportunity to do business in international market and earn money, because of the non-availability of PayPal. Those who manage to do it, find their incomes eaten up due to the high charges of other payment methods, if they pay at all.

All this makes it quite unreasonable for a leading company like PayPal to exclude a certain country from its services and deprive thousands of people an opportunity to join the network of global e-commerce, and in return lose revenue for themselves.

On doing some research on the internet, it is evident that there is a strong desire in Pakistani online community to pursue PayPal to offer their services in Pakistan.

They also feel the absence of a proper platform from where to reach PayPal in a convincing manner. One such hope lies with the Government of Pakistan. An I.T. minister in the previous administration, namely, Awais Leghari, was known for bringing new ideas and technologies and implement them at governmental level. He could have done a useful job if he had done something to provide incentives to companies like PayPal, besides many others, to establish themselves in Pakistan.

Successive governments in Pakistan have been able to bring foreign investors by providing them special incentives and financial security. So why not do it for e-commerce now? Who is the I.T. wizard of government nowadays? Why not convince him to do something in this regard?

We can only hope something is done in this regard as soon as possible.

A possible reason:

After going through eBay forums and PayPal's official blogs, I found many posts where people were asking questions about PayPal's non-availability in Pakistan.

After reading replies given to those questions, one gets an impression that the sole reason for Pakistan being excluded from PayPal is a a political one.
That is: terrorists will use PayPal to send and receive funds from Pakistan. - a kind of statement Pakistanis are sick of listening to.

But this is only an assumption, who knows what the real reason is?