paypalnow.pngThe problem of any would-be Filipino Netrepreneur based in the Philippines is the lack of a reliable and stable online payment gateway. I personally know this since me and my friends have been trying to solve this for almost a year now. We’ve had to rely on alternative methods such as 2checkout, xoom, YOSSN, etc…

A historical tidbit: According to my buddies at work, PayPal was originally available for Filipinos. Due to the high incidence of fraud, they decided to discontinue it’s service. Since then, we’ve all had to without it. There has been a continuous petition to have it offered again in the Philippines but the big bosses there in Paypal aren’t listening.

Looking at the discussions on ebay.ph, there are some explanations for this. Some of the local businessmen asked the PayPal people. One member comments:

I was at the launching dinner party of eBay.ph in Makati 2 days ago and of course the #1 question was why no PayPal here in Phils??The answer we got from the eBay rep was that as long as Philippines is still on the US watchlist of money laundering countries, PayPal can’t come here.It will definitely take a while before they do come here. – billiardcuemaster

Another ebay.ph members says that the ‘official’ statement goes:

The reason they are not ‘yet’ offering services in the Philippines is because of the local Philippine Banks required partner-percentage for PayPal. It is too high for PayPal who gets their revenue in the ‘charge rates’. If the banks will take almost all of it, then PayPal will earn so little in the Philippines. According to them, they will keep on negotiating with the Philippine Banks as they see the market in the Philippines to be high and the country is an asset in the world of e-commerce.

There is more discussion at answercenter.ebay.ph. The essential reasons include:

  1. Banking system here in the Philippines.
  2. Governments policy about the influx or rather out flux of US Dollars.
  3. Relative level of potential fraud.

Other bloggers, like Angelo Racoma, have expressed how it’d be greatly beneficial to the country to have Paypal readily available. He expresses it clearly:

If only we had PayPal in the Philippines, then I think we would be able to open to the world better means to access to our pool of talent.

Heck haven’t people realized yet that a lot of tech and web-programming work are outsourced to Filipinos? An online-payment system would definitely facilitate the way we transact business. We really need PayPal here.

Why? It offers benefits that could allow us an easier way to transact business online. It gives us:

  • An easier opportunity to sell products on the web
  • An easier way for outsourced work to be paid
  • A a more convenient way to transfer money from overseas Filipinos abroad

There is now a real move to have PayPal available in the Philippines. Angelo, Migs, Mike, Abe and other major Pinoy bloggers are supporting it. We’re all lobbying for this work. Let’s support this movement!

We should all blog about this and tell all our friends. Let’s get some media mileage if we can. If the reasons stated above are true, we’ve got to push the banks and the government to address this issue. This is really important and can help our country economically.

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