Lebanon’s payment gateway curse

Typically, when a customer buys a product online through a payment gateway, the cardholder’s information goes through a long chain of servers and processors that link the cardholder, the merchant and the payment association before arriving to the credit card’s issuing bank. The bank then does an automated check before it gives its authorization, which is sent down in reverse order until it reaches the merchant and cardholder. The entire process takes approximately 2–3 seconds. While the technical dimension is quite complex, from a merchant perspective either the payment goes through, or it doesn’t. Unfortunately for Lebanese merchants, the local payment gateways have a high refusal rate on foreign cards. Karim Saikali, a veteran of Lebanese e-commerce who founded BuyLebanese.com explains that many American banks will routinely block transactions that are done on a Middle Eastern payment gateway for “security reasons.” Such blocking is a huge hindrance to Lebanese online