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

[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 Regards
Abhishek

http://stores.ebay.in/Telesolution

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear runalaila_in1,

I am delighted with your concern for genuine buyers. Buyer Protection is a big priority starting now and we have a lot of plans to make sure that we simplify our system asap and all through 2006. (i was myself amazed and disappointed that at times we make buyers wait for upto 60 days due to the lengthy process we have). This will change. However a first and important step is to make all buyers aware that we have a protection programme (my guess is that less than 10% of the users on our site
even know about this programme) This itself will build confidence and we will see a lot more buyers on site.

Even my own mother did not know about this - else i am sure she would have bid on one of the lovely sarees that you are selling:-) Like i said, this is a priority and we will change this to make it simpler.

One of the strongest benefits for Power Sellers is the recognition within the entire community. In addition, we provide additional thinsg like phone support. One thing which we may not do is to only promote power sellers sicne that makes it slightly unfair for new users. However we would like suggestions from you and our Power Sellers on what kind of benefits would they like to see us offer. Regards
Gautam

[telesolutions_in1]

Strange its been 15 mins and nobody is replying to me where is everyone??????? Regards
Abhishek

http://stores.ebay.in/Telesolution

[rohit@ebay.com]

Hello telesolutions_in1,

Yes, Gautam is present on the boards. As he mentioned earlier, he will be replying to users based on the time the query was posted. But he will definitely respond to your query.

Request your patience.
Regards,
Rohit,
Community Development Team

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear laphilatelia,

I am truly sorry to hear about your case. Firstly, and most importantly, I hope your son is better. I pray that this Diwali brings more health and happiness for your family.

We are working to make the entire communication between users and us simpler, for any policy violation related actions such as warnings and suspension. I know that some other sellers have asked for phone support - please read my reply a little earlier on the boards. But i think the bigger point you are making is that we need the system to allow users enough time to make changes before any action is taken. We will definitely look into that. Regards
Gautam

[indconcepts]

Dear Gautam,

I would like to ask you a very frank question.
We have interacted on a number of boards and with a very co-operative ebay staff.

The feeling we get is that ebay.in don't have any powers as an individual company.

All the feedbacks received by Buyers & Sellers are forwarded to ebay.com.
It's they who finally decide what's to be done.
( In consultation with 32 other countries)

My simple question is .....

kindly let us know as to what kind of decision making Powers do ebay.in have ?

I am talking in context of local (Indian atmosphere), where Buyer & Seller are still learning to trade on Net and are unable to cope up with our competitors who have 10 years of experience.

ebay.in must have some powers to put an Indian flavour on the site.( A flavour that doesn't need inputs from other countries )

IndConcepts

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear kaya_jewels

Firstly, it is heartening that our jewellery sellers are seeing a good response when they list internationally. You may know that we charge an international listing fee to avoid international sellers from flooding the Indian site (else all sellers from US andother places would come and list on India so that they could avoid US listing fees etc) hence we have to be prudent with such promotions. We have to keep these considerations in mind, both when deciding the pricing for international listing, as well as the frequency of such promotions. And hopefully since you are seeing triple sales that will make you use these much more and well worth it - i forgot to mention that we do want to make some money as well 🙂
More seriously , the exports team will consider this and other such ideas to help you grow international sales as that is something we believe will be great for India. Regards
Gautam

[cosycom]

Dear Mr. Rohit and eBay.in team , I request you to add some more categories e.g. Display signs , electronic display boards , shop accessories , decor , signage etc. as available on your other international sites.

We sell LED signs and display boards and it is very difficult to find a proper category for the same.

Also kindly inform if we can receive money from our international buyers through paisa pay . At present we have to ask our customers to approach us for our swift code.

kindly arrange for a simple transaction mode for international customers which will certainly help us and eBay to agreat extent.

Thanks

Narinder Singh
Dehradun
eBay ID : cosycom

[gautam@ebay.com]

dear telesolutions_in1
If i am not mistaken you have raised this issue before. And its very impressive that you have seen and are aware of the "it" campaign in the US. I hope you liked it.

The truth is that even in countries like the US TV advertising started many many years after we launched eBay and at a stage when our penetration is very high. It sometimes does not make financial sense to spend on Tv when the market is small (there is a lot of wastage). So at the moment there is no immediate plan to go on TV. However we will be building the brand extensively through internet marketing (i think we are among the biggest spenders online), PR events, on ground events and education as well as partnerships with online savvy users like internet banking and telecom. Regards
Gautam

[rohit@ebay.com]

Dear users,

As it's already past 5 PM, we will need to close the Open House session shortly. Gautam will be present for a few more minutes to respond to all the open queries. Thank you all for participating in this session.

We will continue to monitor this discussion and respond to any queries that we could not respond to during the live session.
Regards,
Rohit,
Community Development Team