As foreign payment services desperately trying to crack into the China market, PayPal makes a surprising progress by forming a partnership with the government of a major city in China. Chris Yao, an eBay/PayPal official, reported on her blog that the joint-effort aims to help China’s online merchants sell to overseas buyers who until now have not been able to do so easily due to lack of payment options supporting cross border transactions.
“Part of the effort involves PayPal and Chinese officials developing a foreign exchange currency service, Yao writes in a blog post. “The hub will help support Chinese merchants to sell their products to buyers all over the world,” Yao writes. “We expect that a faster, simpler foreign exchange conversion process will be a big boost to millions of small businesses and entrepreneurs in China who want to grow by selling their products to the world, but are unsure on how to bring their payments from global buyers back into China in a timely, efficient manner.”
China’s regulators have been tightly controlling any cross border transactions with foreign currency exchanges. Now it appears that they might relax the limitations a little bit. How the efforts fare in reality remain to be seen.
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http://www.internetretailer.com/2010/12/30/paypal-build-e-commerce-hub-southwestern-china