New breed of payment gateways set to revolutionize Arab e-commerce

In the midst of a particularly volatile time for the Middle East and North Africa, there’s at least one thing we can be sure of: more people are spending their money online than ever before. A PayPal study released last year estimates that as of last fall, 30 million people in the Arab region were using the internet for their shopping (up 65% from 2011), and that the regional e-commerce market will grow to $15 billion USD by 2015.

The increasing comfort with e-commerce among MENA internet users spells opportunity for entrepreneurs setting up new shops online, as well as established offline merchants looking to transition to the internet to expand their reach.

But several barriers stand in the way. Regional e-commerce customers are by and large bypassing their local merchants, instead choosing to shop at online retailers based outside the region (PayPal reports that 90% of online transactions in the Arab world are with companies outside the region). This is likely due in part to longstanding security concerns about regional e-commerce sites among buyers in the Arab region, but there’s a more serious issue at work here: local entrepreneurs and established sellers alike have faced a whole host of challenges in setting up shop online, from months-long waits on bank approval, to high currency exchange rates (meaning higher costs for customers), to low transaction approval rates from foreign banks suspicious of customers initiating transactions from the Middle East.

Original article by Stephanie d’Arc Taylor

Continue reading at Wamda:

New breed of payment gateways set to revolutionize Arab e-commerce