ShopYoBrand ran Iraq's credit cards for them — link, buy abroad, pay cash (interview)

In a Rest of World 'as told to' account published May 12, 2020, ShopYoBrand founder Randi Rahbar — raised in the Netherlands, originally from Iraqi Kurdistan — describes a country where banking failures, wars and corruption left people distrusting mobile money, and where even with an international card, secure gateways like eBay often refuse Iraqi purchases. Her answer: 'I do the shipping for customers in Iraq, and they pay me in cash.'

Started at home alone in 2018 with no IT help and no funding — family support instead, since, she says, a woman raising money door-to-door would invite judgment — ShopYoBrand became an online mall of different stores in under two years. Rahbar's own Dutch debit and Swedish credit cards bought original brands from Europe and the US; orders flew to mailing addresses she arranged in the UK and US, then on to Iraq through cargo and logistics partners she had to build relationships with.

The last mile was deliberately analog: a female taxi driver delivered with a manual invoice and collected cash at the customer's door. Pricing was value-based — buy something for $100, pay $20 — with two-to-three-week delivery. Customers bought AirPods and Apple products, and once two Prada bags worth about $7,500.

Success created its own frustration: the site had become a luxury destination for the rich, which was never the intent. By 2020 Rahbar was turning the platform toward what she actually cared about — helping Iraqi and Kurdish makers sell their own handicrafts to the world.

Customers send links; she buys on her own Dutch and Swedish cards via UK/US mailing addresses; a courier collects cash at the door.

Decades of unstable banking meant neither cards nor mobile money could be assumed for Iraqi customers.

Foreign gateways blocked Iraqi buyers, so purchases had to be placed from trusted foreign cards and addresses.

Cash at the door with a manual invoice matched how Iraqis already transacted and built trust without banking.

A flat value-based fee (about 20%) kept pricing simple across orders of wildly different value.

Family-funded bootstrapping avoided both the funding stigma she described and outside pressure.

Where formal rails fail, route around them with the cheapest human workflow — personal cards, a foreign PO box, a courier with paper receipts — before building infrastructure.

By May 2020, two years in, the one-woman website had become an online mall with multiple stores and a grown social community, educated on how to shop online without a credit card. Rahbar was steering it toward exporting Kurdish handicrafts, saying copy-paste luxury links had become 'a boring routine' that drifted from her goal of connecting Iraqis to global commerce in both directions.