Baku, Azerbaijan, July 5
By Huseyn Valiyev - Trend:
The issue of PayPal coming to Azerbaijan may be solved this autumn as part of the expected visit of the company’s representatives to Azerbaijan, Zaur Gardashov, head of the Azexport.az website, told Trend.
He said that as part of the forthcoming talks, it is planned to discuss cooperation in the field of e-commerce.
“So far, negotiations have been conducted indirectly, and in this issue, in addition to our direct appeal to PayPal, the support was provided by ITC (International Trade Center), which is the joint technical cooperation agency of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and WTO, Azerbaijan’s Embassy in the US, the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) and the US Department of Trade,” said Gardashov.
In a certain sense, PayPal’s coming to Azerbaijan has become more complicated due to its leaving the Turkish market, as a result of which PayPal probably started to feel some kind of insecurity in doing business in the region, he noted.
“PayPal wanted to start regional expansion namely from the Turkish market,” Gardashov said. “So now the company is cautious about this region. PayPal’s leaving Turkey somewhat complicated our work. We are familiar with the strategy of PayPal. For example, one of the criteria for this payment system to enter the new market is a country’s membership in the WTO, as the rules of the WTO as a whole coincide with the requirements of PayPal. On the other hand, there are also issues related to legal regulation.”
At one time, PayPal declared its readiness to carry out activity in Azerbaijan as a non-banking organization, but didn’t receive the proper support, he noted.
“The policy of PayPal is that it chooses the model of its work in a particular country and it is open to work with all banks equally, and not just with a single bank,” he said. “Such nuances exist and they haven’t been solved yet. Presently, as is known, Azerbaijani users can only pay for the purchase of goods via PayPal and they cannot sell anything using this payment system, which is now necessary for us to develop online cross-border commerce. Therefore, if there is no alternative, if it is beneficial to us, we should play by the rules of PayPal.”
Nevertheless, the competition in the payment system market is high and due to the availability of alternatives, the issue with PayPal is not so acute as before, he said.
“If we take into account the growing popularity of such platforms as Amazon, Alibaba, AliExpress and others in recent years, then PayPal definitely loses its positions. We are actively using the Payoneer system for organizing sales on Amazon. In addition, there are a lot of alternatives for payment systems and among them there are such payment systems as Alipay, Yandex, Visa, MasterCard and American Express systems that we also use.”
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