Hello,
It's been quite long time since PayPal started to support Egypt on their country's list. Historically, Egyptian users were not able to make online transactions on the Internet due to two reasons. First is the unavailability of PayPal services in their country, secondly that almost 90% of the online merchants are accepting PayPal as a core payment method. Fortunately, two years ago PayPal started to support Egypt list on their supported countries list and it had such a huge positive impact on the Egyptian online users. However, PayPal in Egypt seems to be good for those who are limited for "buying" from the internet, but for merchants who are mainly selling their products online, it didn't really make any sense for them to create an account to only "Buy" and not sell. Though, it made paying bills, online purchases way easier, but their core purpose of having a PayPal account is to sell, not to buy.
PayPal claimed that this is a normal behaviour of distributing their product in a different country, and the full account features are getting enabled by the time. Nevertheless, it's believed that it's time to raise the question about the estimated date for PayPal to enable the receive and Withdraw functionality in Egyptian PayPal accounts. We merchants, have received promises that the feature is going to be enabled this year. Yet here we are starving out with our online trading. PayPal is widest and mostly used payment method by users on the Internet which we are supposed to be selling for, thus and only thus. PayPal has to carry the full responsibility for supporting as most countries they are capable to. The leader online payment gateway has to carry more responsibility towards their customers, basically if you are willing to offer online services or starting your online store while PayPal is not supporting your country, the equation is always equals to 0 and you will end up with your business failing and huge sales decrements since you will not be supporting PayPal as a payment method to your customers.
According to PayPal website, money acceptance, withdrawing is available on Egyptian PayPal accounts.
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-country-functionality-outside&dispatch=5885d80...
However, the truth is far beyond what is found in their website. Simply, create a test Egyptian PayPal account and click on the "Receive money" button, you will find the following message
"Your Account May Only Be Used to Send Money
As a PayPal Send Only account holder, you are not permitted to receive funds from other PayPal account holders.
PayPal is constantly working to expand and improve services for our customers. We hope that we can enable you to use more of our award-winning services in the future."
Eventually, PayPal has been claiming that they are going to support both receive and withdraw money functionality in Egyptian PayPal accounts as soon as possible, but it seems that the ship is not moving towards the front. I hope PayPal state a date for enabling receive and withdraw functionality in Egypt, or even post a simple roadmap for their product in the country, so we merchants can have even a small vision about what is happening behind the scenes.
Best Regards,
Egyptian Merchant.
