Open House Discussion with Gautam Thakar on Aug 25th (5-6 PM)

[sapana@ebay.com]

Dear Users,

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

Join Gautam Thakar, Country Manager – Marketplace, for an online discussion on buying and selling on eBay India.

Gautam will be available on this thread on Thursday, the 25th of August, 2006, from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM IST, for an interactive discussion with our community members.

You can submit your questions before or during the event by clicking on Post a reply at top of the thread. For help on using the discussion boards, please click here - http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?threadID=300000542.

See you on the 25th at 5:00 PM!

Thanks and Regards,
Sapana,
Community Development Team

[rajivalways]

Hello Gautam,

I recently bought an item(140015344794) over eBay, from a Power seller from Calcutta. Now, after one week, I see that "He is no longer a registered user with eBay". I am not getting response to my mails to him. I am not sure that he is geting these messages from eBay. Neither have I received any calls from him !!
In such a scenario, what am I supposed to do ?
How do I contact him??

Regards,
~Rajiv.

[rohit@ebay.com]

Good evening, and welcome to our Open House Session. Today, we have Gautam Thakar, Country Manager - Marketplace with us, to interact with our members, and answer your queries.

Gautam will start off by replying to all the queries that have been posted in advance of the session. He will then move on to answering live questions.

You can post questions to Gautam by clicking on the "Post Reply" link at the top or bottom of the page.
Thanks and Regards,
Rohit,
Community Development Team

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hi everyone,
I am delighted to be on the boards again and have a chance to chat with you and learn from you on areas where we can do better to help our community. I do get to see most of the issues that surface on the voices emails and am going to try and spend much more time to ensure that I am hearing from all of you. For today the formal session is for an hour and unfortunately I have another meeting slightly after that. I will try and answer all of the questions in this time. If I cant I promise that I will ensure that they are all replied over the weekend. My objective is to hear from you and offer some solutions but I will be honest and let you know if there are areas where we will not make changes or if I need to check some more and get back to you. Either way , I will do a follow up post within a month on next steps.

Thanks for taking the time and lets get started. At times you may see a pause in the responses. Doesn’t mean I have gone away – just that I am a slow typist :-) Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hi Ankur (superstorestech),

First of all, thank you for being with baazee and eBay for many years. We appreciate your support. I understand your view but one of the things we do to ensure that we maintain a safe trading environment is to occasionally place selling limits on accounts. However, it does not restrict your ability to sell , merely limits the amount of items on offer at a particular time. My suggestion to you will be to list items that you think are fast moving. This will allow you to improve your feedback ratings and satisfaction ratio on eBay, which will further help you in better sales, and removal of selling limits.

We will always try our best to assist you in building your eBay business, while making sure that both buyers and sellers are having the best experience. Thanks again for your support Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hi Umang (indconcepts)

Thanks for the appreciating the new features and improvements. Such positive comments further energize us towards doing things that are right for our community. That said, I like all our employees do appreciate all the critical suggestions that you and others have since that is the only way to improve. The only thing is that sometimes people get personal (with ebay or employees) and that should be avoided.

Let me try and react to most of your comments

Gallery Fees – Gallery Fees has been introduced for sellers to distinguish their listings from other sellers. In the long run it should help us improve the quality of merchandise and therefore overall buyer experience on site. However that said , I do recognise that unless adoption of this feature is high the resultant buyer experience may not be great.

We believe that this is the right long term solution but as we plan for 2007 we will take a long hard look at this to determine whether it should indeed be changed from current.

In any case , I hope you are aware about the Gallery Plus feature that we are introducing to further add value to the gallery as a feature. To know more, you may click here - http://www2.ebay.com/aw/in/200608.shtml#2006-08-14153457

Multiple Listings –
There is no lack of intent on our part to take action against multiple listing violators – I assure you of that. Its also true that some sellers are misusing the same. The problem is that we need to be absolutely sure of the “violation” and almost like a court of law assume innocence till conclusively guilty. This is sometimes frustrating for community members who report such sellers thereby making our work easier but in some ways we would rather not punish the 1 innocent person wrongly till we find a fool proof case.


PART TWO follows since you had a long mail :-) Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Part 2 - indconcepts
Direct transfer of PaisaPay amount to sellers bank account – This is one area where I will be honest. We need to have it and we are late on it. There are some internal complications (but that should not be your problem). I will take this as a follow up item ; however it is unlikely for a couple of months at least


No stability of Sales for Sellers. (The Sales are moving in a sine curve) –
Wow – that’s the first time I have heard of the sine curve in the eBay context. We, at eBay, are focused on attracting buyers (both new and old), and ensuring that they have a positive buying experience. As you would have noticed, in the past few weeks, we have tried a few different ideas to get buyers (flash sales, style diva etx) and it has got us good results in terms of increased buying and bidding.

We will continue to work on these and ensure that we move to a straight line (upward)

Immediate Payment Required Option – This is again one of the features that we are working on. We will keep you updated on developments regarding the same.
PART 3 to follow Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

PART 3 - indconcepts

No concrete programme for retaining Buyers on the site. – As mentioned above, our team is running programs that have got us good results in getting new buyers and more buying from existing buyers. We are further exploring opportunities whereby we can strengthen our relationship with our existing buyers. This is a key focus area for us and you will hear some plans in this regard

Again, our sellers can do their bit in retaining buyers. Large sellers have various tools at their disposal, like email marketing, newsletters, etc. you can use these tools to market your products to your existing customers. I have also seen some sellers create features like lucky buyer of the month’, referral program etc to retain their existing buyers and get new buyers.

Physical learning centres– This is an interesting thought. More often, such help is something that is required by new users. We already have lot of information on site; however, we have also heard feedback that our users often do not read them.

In order to give our users a direct source of help, we are already in process of putting some programs in place. I will ask Sapana to share some of the detailed plans here with our seller and voices community.

I hope the I have managed to answer at least some of your “tough” questions. I wanted to end on a personal note. I remember long ago I had asked Sanjay to forward you an email from me and I am delighted that since that time you have been one of the actively helpful members to our new members on discussion boards. I will like to thank you for the same, I really appreciate it and would request you to continue with your help and constructive suggestions

Thanks Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hello halwawala_in1,

Glad to see you on discussion boards today and thanks for the warm welcome.

Please allow me to assure you that we are very serious about understanding and solving issues that are faced by our users. You would have noticed that a series of changes have happened in the past year to localise the eBay business and make it more relevant to Indian sellers and buyers. That said, I am the first to admit that we can do even better and we will strive to wards that

Regarding policies, as you would agree with me, eBay benefits by having policies that are most favourable for its users. However, as you would appreciate, it is a tough challenge to balance interest of all users groups involved with eBay, including our sellers, buyers, law of the land and eBay itself. Something that might be good for sellers, might not be a great thing for buyers. Similarly, something which is great for new sellers, might not be as beneficial for existing sellers. Thus at times we are forced to make decisions that we think will benefit the majority of our users in the long run. Having said the above, we continue to monitor and investigate impact of various policies on our users, and modifying them if required.

Seller defined bid increment – To be honest, I don’t foresee this project being taken up by our team in the near future because of the commonality in the global platform (while it may not meet your need, I’d rather be honest than assure you that I will look into it).

I also wanted to thank you for your contribution , conduct and feedback of the Calcutta seminar. Navin and Rajesh were very thankful for your support and I wanted to appreciate that investment of time that you and others have made.

Please feel free to post your other questions if any. Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hi drhimanshu123,

I am sorry to hear about your experience. However, please allow me to assure you that your money is entirely safe. As you know eBay is not the seller but individual sellers sell products. However in the rare case that the seller does not send your product, we have a buyer protection program. I have detailed the process below. I hope you will find it useful.

If a buyer does not get his product, or the product is significantly not as described, the best option for the buyer is to open a Item Not received dispute against the seller.
[My eBay >>> Dispute Console (left side bar)>>> open a dispute]

If the seller does not respond, or the communication fails at any point of time, the buyer needs to close the dispute and escalate the claim for Buyer Protection claim.

I hope this information will be helpful to you and I am sure that you will get a resolution to your satidfaction. Once again I apologize for the experience and we will strengthen the process to minimize such occurrence.

Warm Regards,
Gautam Regards
Gautam

[gautam@ebay.com]

Hi Srinivas (srinivasmantry),

My colleagues at PaisaPay team informed me that your issue has already been resolved. Wishing you a happy shopping experience at eBay!

Regards,
Gautam Regards
Gautam