ISLAMABAD (APP): The e-commerce industry in Pakistan that has been on the rise in past one year or so – needs some fixes as appropriate actions during next few months would determine its future.
The field of electronic commerce is relatively new and its usages are alien to most business enterprises in developing countries. Pakistan constitutes around 200 million individuals, 9 percent of whom went online during last year while another 30 percent are likely to get connected to Internet in next three to five years (or earlier).
With such stats, Pakistan is bound to become next major internet market – in terms of number of connected people – within next few years and this is a potential that should be kept in mind while dealing with all things online.
Best thing about internet – as compared to any offline business – is that you get practically unlimited number of potential customers. Unlike a physical store, an online store is potentially available to whole of Pakistan, if not whole of the world. So if you are shoe maker for example, and you do this well and people have started liking you, then expect thousands of orders if not hundreds of thousands of orders per day, an e-commerce expert said here Tuesday.
He said online stores and businesses have potential of growing larger than airline companies, both in terms of size and revenues. This is exactly how online store and businesses in West have grown larger than their airline companies (both in terms of revenues and valuations); which shows the magnitude and amount of stakes that we are dealing with here.
Despite such huge potentials, our e-commerce industry – like any other thing in Pakistan – is operating with near to zero regulations. Currently, the whole Pakistani commerce industry is operating on Trust which is just a wrong way of doing e-commerce.
Trust is an important factor in doing business but in absence of any laws or rules, just the trust element poses threat to industry in long run.
Such fraudulent activities are in fact already happening, for example a person from Peshawar lost his Rs. 126,000 that he paid online to acquire some computer items. His order was never delivered neither he has received any refund even after three months of initial transaction.
Saleem from Rawalpindi ordered something online few months back but the products that were delivered were different from what he had originally paid for. The online company denied him any refund for more than two months until he decided to go legal against them. Matter was later resolved through negotiation.
Similarly, a person from Karachi Gaffar Ahmad ordered an Air Conditioner (AC) from Daraz.PK and paid the bill through credit card in advance. After two weeks, instead of delivering the
order, Daraz notified him that AC was out of stock and that his payment will be refunded after 45 days because that’s how banking system works.
When Ahmad took the issue to social media Daraz.PK CEO had to intervene himself to get his refund. There are countless other cases – that never made onto the radar – where people were either defrauded by getting wrong products or by no deliveries at all.
Time has come for us to regulate our e-commerce industry. If we want our online stores to not to destroy such a huge potential or if we want to get AliBaba and Amazon replicas in Pakistan, then there is a need to regulate the industry at earliest to make sure that everyone has a set of defined protocol for carrying out e-commerce business processes.
The best way of going about regulating e-commerce industry is to have a separate government body that should regularize e-commerce businesses and it should be mandated with implementation of commerce policies.
