The Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (ICCI) organized a webinar on “The Magic Moment of Successful E-Commerce” to sensitize its members about promoting businesses by using e-commerce platforms. The objective of the session was to help SMEs take a high-level holistic view of the digital transformation around traditional commerce. ICCI has planned to hold a series of webinars on e- commerce and it was the first session of the series. ICCI would hold webinar series on other topics including panel discussions on marketplaces, e-commerce success stories, logistics and online payments to educate its members about fostering businesses by utilizing e-commerce tools. Badar Khushnood, Co-founder and Vice President of Growth at Bramerz gave a detailed presentation to the participants about the potential of e-commerce for business promotion. He informed the participants about the global trends and what was happening in Pakistan around e-commerce and what initiatives were being taken by the government to promote e-commerce. The session provided SMEs an overview of what an e-commerce business looked like and sensitized them that e-commerce was not just setting up a website using free tools. SMEs were asked to re-engineer all other businesses processes to make the “magic moment of a successful e-commerce” transaction to happen in real time. Ms. Amina Malik, Convener, ICCI Women Entrepreneurship Sub-Committee played the role of Moderator in the webinar. Addressing the webinar, Muhammad Ahmed Waheed, President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that e-commerce was now billions dollar market and government should formulate conducive policies for promoting e-commerce in Pakistan. He said that e-commerce offered tremendous opportunities to SMEs for business promotion, expansion of customer base and entering new product markets. He said that in many countries, SMEs were achieving impressive growth by adopting e-commerce platforms and SMEs in Pakistan should also focus on this tool to promote businesses. He said that adoption of e-commerce would bring multiple benefits to SMEs as it would reduce cost of doing business for them and provide them access to global markets. Muhammad Ahmed Waheed said that in Pakistan, SMEs were using the Internet for a variety of commercial and production-related purposes, but on average they had a limited understanding of the full range of benefits of e-commerce. He said that lack of awareness of the potential of e-commerce in SMEs was considered as an important barrier to its adoption. He said that inadequate investment in skills and the initial high investment costs involved in developing e-commerce strategies were also considered as hurdles in promoting digital economy in Pakistan. He said that main purpose of organizing series of webinars on e-commerce at ICCI was to educate the SMEs to focus on conducting transactions through e-commerce, especially at a time when people were reluctant to visit markets due to Covid-19 pandemic. He hoped that this initiative would help SMEs in exploring new horizons of business promotion by using e-commerce platforms.