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Amazon In Pakistan

I saw this article making waves in all the e-commerce & startup groups of Pakistan. After I read it, I couldn’t really make much out of it. It didn’t excite me. So I shared it on slack to get the opinion of my colleagues to see if they feel anything different. But we all came to the same conclusion.

One of our colleagues said that this news is similar to PayPal coming to Pakistan for the 24th time.

Another one of my colleague reminded me of another story from 2017 when government spent over a billion Rs to get artisans of Pakistan to sell on the internet. More on this in tomorrow’s blog.

Somehow we all feel, this is headlines. Exactly what the government is good at. Making headlines. And only that.

As I understood it, the government has sent a list of 34 exporters from Pakistan to Amazon so they could be eligible to sell on Amazon. After the trial run, based on the performance of these exporters, government and Amazon will expand this list to other categories.

However I am curious how these exporters were selected? I’m assuming they were either selected by nepotism or by the size of their volume. For the sake of optimism, let’s assume there was no nepotism and they were selected solely based on the size of their volume. Or another powerful metric that made them seem worthy of this selection. However, these traditional metrics say nothing about the exporters’ ability to do well on Amazon. Because selling on a platform like Amazon is a science which isn’t determined solely by the quality of goods, but also largely dependent on the science of launching a product on Amazon.

The transition from offline to online isn’t for everyone. Businesses that have years of selling experience through the old means can not always, and often, transition successfully to new ways of selling.

I can think of countless examples in every industry where the old successful companies often fail to pivot if the industry sees a technological upgrade. Nokia is an example in the phones industry. Kodak is a similar example from the camera industry. When there’s a technological evolution, the old giants fail. The new giants emerge. The large exporters will fail on Amazon no matter how good they are with their products and with the old distribution channels. They need support from the e-commerce experts to run a successful e-commerce business.

For the trial to be successful, a partnership with an e-commerce consultant agency is a must. I’m not sure if there’s a partnership in place. This consultant would ensure that most product launches by most exporters would be successful. This could then help with the expansion of categories as the government plans.

The people who specialize in e-commerce are usually different from people who kick-ass with traditional export channels. For the program to be successful, young blood from the e-commerce space needed to sign up through this program and not the large exporters, or at the minimum in partnership.

Unless the Amazon seller central is available to every citizen of Pakistan, that allows the young blood to compete in a cut-throat marketplace and win, I see this news or any similar news as fake news.