There are rumours flying around that PayPal are to open their first offices in Russia. The rumour was started by Alain Vladimir, the founder of recruitment agency Pruffi, who says PayPal will open a small Russian office in the Autumn.
We asked PayPal who told us “PayPal has a strong and growing business throughout Europe, and Russia is an interesting market where we’re seeing a lot of demand for localized PayPal services. Beyond that, we’re not discussing any specific information about our future growth plans in the region.”
To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if PayPal did open an office in Russia – it’s a big country and to become a world leader in the payments industry then PayPal are likely to be eyeing up many new territories and looking to exploit them. Russia would be the ideal base for an office to service much of Eastern Europe from.
It’s only in the last five years that PayPal have started to allow Russians to use PayPal, prior to that it wasn’t unusual for PayPal users holidaying in Russia and checking their PayPal account to find it was blocked or closed on their return home (I would still be hesitant to log into my PayPal account in certain countries!)
Times are changing though and whilst embracing countries like Russia will force PayPal to review their risk profiles there’s no question that emerging economies offer massive growth to PayPal in the future.
2 Responses
I found this an interesting article, as I have just blocked all sales from Russia / Russian Federation across my ecom business. At the moment it is extremely risky to post parcels there, as the only service out of the UK to RUS is RM International Signed For. Thing is the Russian postal servce do not scan any of my (past) parcels, so I am open up to chargebacks by these customers through paypal. I seem to be getting a very high proportion of these resulting in a chargeback.
Secondly all couriers have now stopped shipments to residential addresses in Russia, and all business addresses outside of Moscow region, so there is now no way of insuring an expensive parcel, and getting a service with decent tracking.
Its a shame, as there’s lots of money flowing out of Russia.
I’ve just yet another claim for an undelivered packet to Moscow via PayPal.
Russia is the only country I won’t mail to now as nothing ever reaches it’s destination…