[UPDATE: Read it till the bottom] Three years ago in Beirut, the general manager of PayPal in the Middle East Elias Ghanem stood up a...
[UPDATE: Read it till the bottom]
Three years ago in Beirut, the general manager of PayPal in the Middle East Elias Ghanem stood up at the Lebanese branch of the tech festival ArabNet and made an announcement that brought the conference to life.
Egypt, he said, would have PayPal within months. Lebanon would have it before the end of 2013. The crowd was excited, and the Middle Eastern blogosphere wentwild over a declaration that had the potential to give a huge boost to Middle Eastern e-commerce.
Next week, the conference is due to start again. A year on, Egypt is now over six months into its PayPal experience — one that the company’s Middle East business development head Francis Barel describes as a “major success.”
The Lebanese launch, however, is not just stuck in the pipeline – it has been taken out of it altogether. Currently, Barel says, there are no specific plans to launch in Lebanon at all. “We are trying to expand to new territories and to other countries, but right now we don’t have specific targets for Lebanon,” he says.
PayPal, the world’s leading service managing online payments, is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Owned by eBay, it is rapidly exploring new markets, with Barel saying they are currently present in 200 countries worldwide.
Yet Lebanon is not among them. Anyone in Lebanon wanting to buy goods or services via PayPal are not permitted to do so, and even those based in Lebanon with foreign bank accounts face problems. This is one of the reasons e-commerce has been so slow to catch on — according to a 2013 Ipsos poll, only 1.44 percent of Lebanon’s internet users (who make up 60 percent of the population) shop online.
I'm myself tried to contact them many times hoping to get a satisfying response. The latest response i got wasn't so different than the rest of them, but it was somehow made me consider some real facts, Paypal are offering their services, and their objective is to spread the world, operate in more countries as they get the chance, but why not in Lebanon yet?
Here's the last message I Received:
Thanks for contacting us regarding providing our services in Lebanon.
To comply with local laws and financial regulations, PayPal is currently unable to offer this option. On the bright side we are constantly working towards supporting Lebanon since it would be beneficial for both of us to be able to offer this service to you. We are doing our best to make this feature available in the near future by negotiating with the Central Bank of Lebanon.
When additional features are made available you’ll be the first to know. ..."
So doesn't make you think that we should actually do something about it? make a move from the inside, ask the government or the relevant authorities to do something, oh wait, our government? our authorities? do we even have a president?
No we don't! So let's stop worrying about when it will be available, and let's change their way of thinking towards the online shopping experience.
So as an answer to the title's question, NO! Paypal wont be available in Lebanon in 2017, not before we break the ice of silence.
This is a personal-opinion post, I take all the responsibilities.
