I am seeing that media and people are excited for “Pakistan getting listed among Amazon Sellers”. Not to disappoint anyone, but I believe we all are a bit overexcited about exaggerated news.
Let me break it down for you.
This is the ease of business for sellers who had to look for some relatives and friends in foreign countries to register companies and accounts on their names, nothing else.
1) Amazon is not launching or operating in Pakistan.
2) Amazon is not providing any fulfillment services or warehousing facilities in Pakistan.
3) Our exports are generally over-valued and mostly the sellers will still have to rely on China for getting the cheap suppliers.
4) Our export policies are not E-commerce friendly as we have to guarantee payments even before the inventory reaches our customers.
5) Our legal frameworks for an online business are another issue to deal which that needs classification and revival.
6) Transactions between abroad and local parties are an issue yet to be resolved as we don’t have a platform like Paypal.
7) Transactions exceeding the amounts of 5k Dollars are not allowed by the state bank so far.
Yes, it is the ease of business, but not the whole solution.
I think only 10-20% of the work is done, the remaining is left.
The good news is that the ice-breaking process is complete. Now our government has the rest of the duty to make things even better and smooth the processes for further facilitation so that we can actually benefit from this.
