OICCI organized a webinar titled “Opportunities and Challenges in E-Commerce – Policy Prospective” on July 27, 2022. The speaker, Badar Khushnood, Chairman, Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ATES and Co-Founder and Vice President of Growth at Fishry, discussed at length, the scope and challenges faced by e-commerce marketplaces, merchants, and consumers.

The speaker shared that while COVID helped Pakistan e-commerce sector grow, its share is still below 1% of the total market. Nevertheless, the recent imposition of withholding tax is hampering the growth of this sector. Besides this, issues in product quality, return and exchange, physical markets being back to normal and recent economic disruptions are also affecting the growth of this sector.

Despite its potential, this sector is facing some challenges which need to be addressed to reap the full benefits to be gained from this sector. Only 10% of the trade on e-commerce is through digital payments and hence being recorded correctly, most of the e-commerce is based on cash on delivery in which there is no stakes of the consumers because of which there is high rate of return and cancelation of the orders. Higher cost of digital transactions as compared to cash, lack of trust in digital wallets, complication of the process and tax harassment issues need immediate attention of all stakeholders. Moreover, the registration process of local payment gateways is complicated, lengthy, and non-digital because of which, some sellers prefer opting to international payment gateways rather than using local payment gateways. There is, therefore, a need to digitalize and smoothen registration process to make it at par with international standards.

Badar Khushnood highlighted that the role of consumer courts and education is extremely important in improving the trust of the consumers on e-commerce. The courts should work digitally removing cumbersome physical visits, with proceedings bound by a timeline. Speaking on the importance of quality of human resource, Badar told that our universities are producing more than 25000 Computer Science and IT graduates but sadly, most of them are not trained and educated on the modern lines and therefore do not have skills that are needed by the industry. PASHA is working on improving the quality of curriculum of the universities so that we can produce quality human resource. Moreover, children are also needed to educate on digital rights, spamming, hacking and other kinds of cyber crimes so that they have a knowledge of good and bad use of internet and digital technologies and tackle any issue they face, effectively.

It is the time that local investors and foreign investors who are already in Pakistan, should step up into setting up corporate venture arms and investing in local start-ups. Government should also give incentives to the corporates which are investing in start-ups and sharing their knowledge and experience with them.

Aleem Sb, CE/Secretary General OICCI,concluded the session by thanking Badar Khushnood for the very valuable session which helped understanding of the real challenges faced by e-commerce sector and shared that the issues of outdated and over regulations, scarcity of well-trained human resource, and policy inconsistency are hampering the growth of businesses in Pakistan across all sectors and therefore, raising voice collectively will be more effective to get the issues resolved. He appreciated the participants for attending the session and engaging in the discussion. The session was attended by 97 participants.