Saudi Arabia is required to address a number of issues that are posing as hurdles for the potentially high growing e-commerce transactions in the Kingdom, said an official of a leading online payments solutions provider based in Riyadh. Muhannad Ebwini, General Manager, OneCard, said for online payment providers the major challenges are to be constantly innovative, offer services to as many types of customers as possible, and create resilient security measures. “There are definitely a lot of growth opportunities in regional e-commerce, especially in major free market economies such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The region has a young, tech-savvy middle-income group who are already patronizing e-commerce as a more convenient transaction method,” Ebwini said. He, however, said several issues have to be addressed to maximize the potential of electronic commerce and payments, such as the lack of region-wide laws covering the sector and growing security threats as a result of Middle East's expanding Internet population. “Driven by infrastructure developments, online public services, higher Internet penetration and usage the growth of e-commerce transactions in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries is poised to surpass 15 percent in 2010,” he said. Ebwini said the region is home to over 60 million Internet users and over 80 million mobile phone users, making it a huge market for online and mobile commercial transactions. However, he said there remained several obstacles to the smooth growth of this sector, he said. It is important to constantly monitor market trends, invest more in infrastructure, encourage policy development, and create high-quality services, he said. Travel and gaming have emerged as the region's top two e-commerce segments, he said. Travel has been one of the largest and most competitive online sectors for the past three years, he said.
