You Can Now Use PayPal to Buy and Sell Stuff in 203 Countries

Internet payment company PayPal is opening for business in 10 new countries this week, bringing the total number in which it operates to 203.

PayPal is expanding into the following countries: Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Monaco, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Paraguay and Nigeria. The latter has the largest potential marketplace for PayPal with 60 million Internet users, according to measurements by Euromonitor International.

PayPal will not introduce all its services at once in the new countries. PayPal executive Rupert Keeley told Reuters the company will only launch the “send money” feature at first, which allows consumers to make online payments to pre-approved merchant sites. The service will not enable payments to local merchants, but Keeley believes that PayPal can still “give our sellers selling into this market a great deal of reassurance.”

The eBay-owned e-commerce company also hopes to increase the number of secure Internet transactions in countries fraught with fraudulence, Reuters reports.

[Reuters]