Holiday Online Sales Great- But Not For T&T Business

In the Business Express of Jan 9, 2013 the cover story inside headlined the ‘Steady growth in credit card purchases‘ while the cover page proclaimed ‘Online shopping surge at Christmas: Click and Collect’ causing me to snort out some of my coffee. I couldn’t imagine it referring to Trinidad & Tobago (unless I just awoke from a coma) but it did, but when I read on, it in fact turned out to be true- though not the coma part.

The story reported that the Christmas holiday season was the culmination of a ‘bumper year’ for the growing local trend of shopping online on US sites and having packages delivered via the many shipping agents in Trinidad now offering the service. Such is the trend that even the major retailers like Macy’s and JC Penney are now offering direct shipping to Trinidad, you can check for yourself.

The point of this article is to explain what this means: it means exactly what I’ve been screaming about for the entire 2012- there is HUGE potential for local e-commerce but by now my lungs are shot. The head of the San Fernando Business Association, Daphne Bartlett was quoted as saying “The thing about it is that you cannot set up payment directly to a local bank. You must have a US based bank account…”. However, that isn’t accurate as you CAN set up payment with a local bank, Scotiabank is one example with their (outrageously expensive and unfriendly in my opinion) e-commerce ‘solution’. Another example is a third party payment processor 2Checkout, which I’ve personally set up with one of my clients TnT Bamboo Online. 2Checkout lists Trinidad & Tobago among the countries it remits collected payments to in US Dollars via wire transfer, see list here.

Bottom line, there is nothing preventing local e-commerce, regardless of the lack of will by the local banks to facilitate same through some foreign partnership and I have my own opinion on why this is so but I can’t write it here. With most Trinis having relatives abroad in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Canada, there are still ways to obtain a US based Paypal account. What is actually lacking are the individuals in Trinidad & Tobago willing to do it right.