AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE (AFP)
In this photograph taken on March 14, 2015, Shayaan Tahir (R), CEO of Homeshopping.pk, speaks to a customer at his call centre in Karachi. PHOTO/AFP
For Shayaan Tahir, it all began when an order he placed on Amazon for a new iPod was rejected because the online giant would not deliver electronics to Pakistan.
Frustrated, he decided to take matters into his own hands and founded one of Pakistan’s first e-commerce ventures, a sector that today is booming.
That was seven years ago.
Like thousands of other young Pakistanis, Tahir was working at a call centre in the city of Karachi, the country’s violent, freewheeling economic hub located on the Arabian sea.
He had saved hard to buy himself an iPod, only to have his purchase blocked.
He enlisted a cousin in the United States to send him three of Apple’s music players. Tahir kept one and sold the other two via classified ads.
And that was when the idea hit him: to create his own Amazon-like site for Pakistan, a country of almost 200 million people that has been all but forgotten by the web giants ubiquitous in the West.
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