More than one in three online retailers in the Middle East do not offer credit card payment options, data show, holding back growth in the region's e-commerce industry.
A recent report by the Arab Advisors Group, a technology research consultancy, found that of the 102 e-commerce portals across the MENA region, only 64 provided customers with a credit card payment scheme to buy goods online.
Alaa Numair, the senior research analyst for Arab Advisors who co-authored the report, attributed this to security concerns regional consumers may have when shopping online.
"People do not really understand how to use a credit card, or they have some issues about the security behind using credit cards," said Mr Numair. "They basically are afraid to use their credit cards online."
He said he expected Middle East e-commerce sites to offer credit card payment methods in the next few years. But more than 40 per cent of e-commerce sites have incorporated wire transfers and cash on delivery as payment methods.
Mr Numair also said a lack of Arabic language portals could also prevent e-commerce from flourishing in the region.
"Most of the people here are Arabic-speaking and not all of them speak English," Mr Numair said. "While there are some people that understand English, other can't even buy anything because they can't understand the website at all."
Martin Waldenstrom, the chief executive of CashU, a third-party online payment system owned by the Jabbar Internet Group, said forming partnerships with banks to offer credit card payments was an extremely complex process.
Mr Waldenstrom said that to offer credit card payments online, companies must put a large sum into an escrow account to cover the bank's risk.
"If you look regionally, if you look at e-commerce, it's still in its infancy," he said. "If you're an individual and say, in Egypt, you don't have a regional company, it's more or less impossible to get a bank to help you with credit card payment online."
But there is notable demand among the region's online shoppers. In a recent online shopping study by MasterCard, four out of 10 respondents from the UAE said they planned to make purchases online last year, an increase on the fewer than three out of 10 who planned to do so in 2009.