By Emmanuel Narokobi - 2nd April 2006

We’ve been working recently on a website for the Kumul Lodge, based in Enga. It’s a beautifully kept secret in PNG. The interesting thing for us about this job was not so much the chance to travel for a website job, but the fact that the PNG Tourism Promotion Authority (TPA) paid us for this job. TPA’s funding for this job is an amazing step forward for tourism websites in PNG. TPA’s encouragement and the growing number of tourism websites in PNG like the well known PNG Business Directory (PNGBD) is doing wonders for the online presence of PNG.

We have seen a handful of PNG websites now also incorporating online sales into their sites, especially hotels. Which all in all is an exciting prospect to think that although we are light years behind the rest of the world, the first steps into e-commerce are beginning to take place. Judging by all these developments it is therefore not hard to see that tourism will perhaps be the most proactive industry in PNG to push the development of e-commerce.

In 2000, we wrote an article on e-commerce in PNG, it was a long time ago, but it still highlights today what we still need to have in place for PNG to fully utilise the economic benefits of e-commerce. In our paper we noted seven major areas of the PNG environment that needed to be addressed:

(i) Awareness and Education
(ii) The PNG Market size
(iii) E-commerce infrastructure
(iv) Telecommunications infrastructure
(v) Legal System
(vi) Government Role
(vii) Business Models

Despite the above list, technically it is possible to conduct e-commrce in PNG. However one of the interesting dilemas we face now is that we are still not able to have credit card payments on the internet made into PNG bank accounts. As Tony Westaway, former Retail Manager for Bank South Pacific explained to us, “…Internet Banking does not provide for transfer of funds to accounts at overseas Banks and this is because of the need to meet Exchange Control and IRC regulations. Likewise we do not receive funds transferred in electronically apart from via the SWIFT protocol (commonly referred to as telegraphic transfers).These funds coming into PNG from say Australia are usually from an Australian dollar account conducted within that country…”

What this all means is that if you want to do e-commerce right now, all your money will have to go to an overseas account, before it gets transferred via telegraphic transfer back to your account in PNG. This translates into longer waiting periods for payments to get to you and increased costs in banking fees.

It is good to see however that our tourism website population is growing and this will in turn lead us into improvments in our customer service on these websites, which hopefully will lead to e-commerce initiatives. So our guess is it that it will only be a matter of time before some large private or government body with a website pushes for e-commerce payments to happen in PNG for it be be used widely by other PNG websites.

PNG will get there eventually, but in the meantime to all those websites embarking on e-commerce initiatives, please keep in mind security. I have seen at least 2 PNG hotel websites with unsecure pages which ask for credit card details.

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