Open House Discussion with Gautam Thakar, Country Manager - Marketplace

[rohit@ebay.com]

We are pleased to announce the next session of our Open House Program, where users get an opportunity to chat with the eBay India Management Team.

Join Gautam Thakar, Country Manager - eBay India Marketplace, for a discussion on buying and selling on eBay India. Gautam will be available on this thread on Friday, the 4th of November, 2005 from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM IST, for an interactive session with our users.

Make the most of this Open House Session to interact with Gautam, provide him your feedback, and ask him any questions you might have related to trading on eBay.

You can submit your questions before or during the event by making a post on this thread.

For help on using the discussion boards, please click here.

See you on the 4th at 4:00 PM!

Regards,
Rohit,
Community Development Team

[gautam@ebay.com]

Dear avin21_in1,

I totally agree with you that we need to improve our processes towards buyers. The community boards provide us with a great platform to understand the pain points of our community. We read the boards regularly, and have already identified buyer side policies and processes as a key focus area for us over the next few months.

It is vitally important for us to attract and retain buyers on the site. We are a marketplace, sellers are present on the site because we get buyers coming to the site, and vice versa. Yes, I admit that we might not have been as focused on our buyer issues as seller issues (though surprisingly our sellers tell us that we care only for buyers), but we are totally focused on setting that right. Buyers can expect to see changes in this over the next few months.

Finally, let me assure you that we do read the boards, and try to make changes to the platform based on the feedback we read on the boards. However, the boards are not the right channel for us to provide customer support. For that, you need to write in to us using the following web form - http://pages.ebay.in/help/contact_us/_base/index.html. Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Thank you for your wishes indconcepts.
One thing i wanted to mention is that i will be answering the questions based on when they were posted (ie earlier ones first) Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear sripathykarur

Absolutely, this is the right forum for you to seek clarifications. However, as I mentioned earlier, it is not the right channel for specific user support. You will get the fastest and most specific responses if you use our contact us web form within the help section.

As a marketplace with thousands of product categories, it is difficult for us to monitor the pricing of each and every item on the site. We feel that the best way to ensure that buyers get the best deal on eBay is to attract more and more sellers to the site, and then let market economics drive the pricing. That way buyers will see who offers the best value and make the choice. However your suggestions clearly means that this is a problem you are facing and we will spend some time internally thinking about if there is more we can do systematically to help you and other users such as yourself. Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

touch_and_shine and halwawala_in1,

Feedback is an important area for all of us. As you know 'feedback left by members who get suspended within 90 days of registration does not count for your ratings' . This has already happened. In December the following 2 changes will go live (i) feedback from members who do not participate in online dispute process (UPI) will not count (ii) tutorial for new users leaving first neutral or negative feedback . Apart form these upcoming changes to the system, we are looking at what more we should be doing to address the following issues:
1. Increase awareness (and usage) of feedback so that more and more users leave feedback for their trading partner.
2. Educate users on the importance of feedback, especially negative feedback.
3. Other changes required for our community (for example, increasing the feedback limit from the existing 80 character limit)

There are certain cases when when ebay does remove the ratings. For example, feedback left by a member who provided eBay with false contact information and could not be contacted can be removed. For this, you need to write in to us, with the details, using the Contact Us web form. Some of our sellers have already been doing so, and their unjustified feedback has been removed.

I know that feedback is a very emotional topic for all of us (and rightly so). I will be pushing this very hard with other countries to try and get these features faster

Phone support is a new initiative mainly for power sellers right now. It is an important benefit for users who demonstrate the best behaviour on site and hence we thought we should have it for this group. Also given that its a new initiative we wanted to learn on this and perfect the system before we consider expanding it. Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Dear touch_and_shine
I forgot to address your question on prizes. I believe that your prize had already been despatched but not received. We will be resending one today. Also , please trust that we treat all contests on ebay seriously and that there is absolutely no question of not wanting to send the prizes out. There may have been an oversight in address, courier issues or some other mistake but we will never put together a program which we do not intend to fully execute as mentioned. Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Dear halwawala_in1
It was nice of you to visit our office for the voices session. I hope you got a chance to meet the people and got the sense that they are all committed to helping you - our users and community. Sometimes , and i will be honest with you, it is disheartening for our employees to hear our top users complain and allege that eBay employees do not care. I do want to assure you that this is far from the truth. I fully agree that there may be certain policies where the compnay may have a different point of view but we are all committed to helping you and doing the best we can to grow your business (especially since thats the only way we can grow our business)
So please rest assured that we are definitely listening and will be looking into most issues where we can make a change. On a personal level, especially since you have visited our office and met our employees i will request you to continue to reach out to us but i do hope that you will agree that they will all be doing their best to help all our users. Regards
Gautam

[telesolutions_in1]

Hi gautam,
Happy Diwali,

I just wanted to ask you that what are the steps ebay is taking to build ebay as a brand, actually still most of the people dont recognize ebay we still have to tell them baazee.com peple still remember baazee but very few know about ebay.

This was due to the offline adverts bazee used to do, eBay internationally also does a lot of offline advetrs and now they have got a ""it campaign"".

Is ebay india going to anything like it?????????? Regards
Abhishek

http://stores.ebay.in/Telesolution

[telesolutions_in1]

Gautam YOu there????????????????? Regards
Abhishek

http://stores.ebay.in/Telesolution

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear vgabraham,

First of all I assure you that if you are eligible for the credits, you will definitely receive them.

There are various promotions that we run for our sellers. The reality, and again i would rather be transparent with you, is that our system is NOT geared for completely automating all these promotions. There are some promotions where the system automatically provides the credits to the sellers, and others, where it takes more time. The choice we had was to either provide only those promotions to the sellers where the system supports automated credits, or to provide more promotions for sellers where they can decide for themselves whether or not to avail of the promotion.

We decided on the latter, and have been running such promotions for a few months now. We will look at automating all promotions - but i fear that this will take a long time as changing billing systems is very complicated.

However this is an interesting debate - if all sellers believe that they would rather not get these types of promotions and only have teh few where automated credits are possible today then we will go with that. Personally i hope that is not the ase as these will be more benefecial for all of you. Again, let me assure you that if you are eligible for the credits, you will definitely receive them. Regards
Gautam

[telesolutions_in1]

Rohit is Gautam still on the boards?? Regards
Abhishek

http://stores.ebay.in/Telesolution