Chat with Rajan Mehra, Country Manager, eBay India (7 Feb, 5 - 6 PM)

[indraneel@ebay.com]

Dear Members

Join Rajan Mehra, Country Manager, eBay India for an Open House discussion on buying and selling on eBay India. Open House gives senior eBay staff members the opportunity to interact with members of the community and we presume that community would also be equally eager to do the same.

Rajan will be available on this thread on Thursday, the February, 07 2008, from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM IST for an interactive discussion with our community members.
Click on 'Post a Reply' link at top of the page to submit your questions before or during the discussion.

Please read Rajan's message to the community.

See you on February, 07 2008 at 5:00 PM!

Regards,
Indraneel

[emailswarup]

Dear Mr. Mehra,

Sorry to say that I am very much disheartened with the current functioning of ebay India. There are too many points but to keep the list short and suitable for the board, I am listing only a few.

Firstly, it seems that the discussion boards have lost all importance to ebay because members write and request for replies from ebay but most often there is no reply from ebay for weeks and some times the replies are totally off-track. The members put on lots of suggestions but most of them are not even acknowledged ( I no more expect ebay to check and implement some of the good suggestions ).

The new PaisaPay system is full of bugs. A new problem faced my me this week - Two sellers are unable to send me PaisaPay enabled Invoices for multiple items bought by me because of your technical problems. They have sent me messages from ebay CS acknowledging the problem but without any time frame to solve it.

You have autocratically fixed all the time frames of PaisaPay. But how can a seller guarantee the delivery schedule. Let us mention our own delivery schedule in a specified area while listing. If we fail that then only you can reverse the payment. Most of the international buyers opt for normal registered post and it often takes 5-6 weeks to deliver. How can a buyer, not paying speed post charges, can expect to get the item in 3 weeks by registered Air mail when the normal delivery period is often as long as 4-8 weeks and the same is mentioned in the listing.

Many sellers are complaining about deduction of NEFT by some banks for PaisaPay transfers. You are able to wait for more than a month before releasing the international transaction payment. Then why not give us the option of waiting for at lest 15 days to combine some payments and take an single transfer, thus save wastage due to NEFT. Is it practical & prudent to receive 2 transfers of Rs.200/300 in a span of 3-4 days and pay Rs.56 to bank on account of NEFTs. Isn't it logical to receive a single transfer and pay Rs28 only?

Many sellers are complaining about the 400% hike in the sales volume for maintaining Power Seller status. Some are also complaining regarding the ER withdrawal. There are complains regarding Selling Manager and many more.

I would request ebay to be less dictatorial and feel the pulse of the community. Please discuss and get some feedback from the community before introducing some drastic change. Lastly, when you discuss something please be flexible to change other wise there is no point in discussing on a stubborn rule. Hope you will agree that we, the members, also have some sense of logic and management and spend much more time on ebay compared to the meager profit many of us earn thru it.

I hope you will agree that an increase in profit by taking away the smiles of the customers is never a sustainable profit.

Lastly, in the link http://pages.ebay.in/community/aboutebay/news/infastfacts.html you have mentioned some selling frequencies for ebay India in minutes. It translates to about 1059 sales per day for all major categories combined. I dont think someone can be content with that figure considering there are 12800 sellers. Let us all strive to achieve the same frequency in seconds before the end of 2009. After all, nothing is impossible if everybody co-operates and put on hard work to achieve a team goal.

Sorry for the long posting.

Thanks for giving your time to the community. Shall try to join the chat on 7th. .
Best Regards 😄
Swarup
Kolkata

[cochinmall]

Hello Mr Mehra,

I am glad to hear that you would be coming for an online workshop through community discussion boards.Actually, almost every seller on ebay.in is waiting to post their worst and good experience about the online portal.

Have just gone through your message for the coming year.Was really encouraging and on a positive note.First of all,I have to thank ebay.in for introducing a new category on ebay.in called creative listing where I had won a prize and got recognition in the print media.

But to make your vision in 2008 successful,there are a lot of things to be mended before you have noted the ground reality of the website.

New Paisapay:-
New Paisapay was introduced on the note that it would benefit the buyers and bring more successful sales to the seller.But New paisapay has a lot of bugs and glitches which the Paisapay team has to bear with everyday.

If the new system was ridden with bugs,then why introduce such a system without testing it properly.Why cant Paisapay integrate with PayPal,so there wont be any problems? Currently most of the sellers advice their buyers to pay using PayPal rather than New Paisapay. Indian sellers are shameful to encourage the International buyers to pay through their Indian counterpart "PaisaPay" as it has a lot of bugs.Their image about ebay.in would be bad due to New Paisapay problems.

Rise in Fees:-
Ebay has risen Paisapay service charges to 4.5% from the previous 3.5%.Include FVF,we get a total of 9.5% which gets added to the original intended cost of selling. Courier charges are rising day to day due to increase in fuel surchages as global oil prices rise.

When the total gets added up,the prices may go above the local prices available in ones own city.If it is like that,how can ebay plan to retain buyers?Sellers have to bear the EMI charges too,which a buyer has to be bear like in bank loans.All adds up to the cost of the product.

These were the two important matters which have to be mended up before going on succesfully ahead in the year of 2008.Hope to have some remedy for the problems and no "copy-paste" please.It is a usual routine of the ebay community employees to do this.

Regards
Rahul
cochinmall

[veedeedirect]

Dear Rajan,

Welcome to the community boards. Congratulations on all the acheivement of the past year. And may ebaY in the coming year scale new heights.

There are a few things I would like to bring to your attention which are creating a non level playing feild amount sellers.

1) The Express Remittance is creating a unlevel playing field amount sellers which is against ebay ethics. New sellers will get paid after upto 21 days and established sellers are getting paid immediately. Today the rate of interest ranges from 1% (commerical PLR) to 3.14% (credt card interest) and even higher for patpedhis (indian nbfc) and money lenders. So this creates a huge disadvantage for new sellers. I would like you to dwelve on this. Today in product lines such as branded CE and IT products where margins a thin, a new seller will never be able to complete with established sellers.

2) VAT issue. The vat functionality has errors which have not been corrected for years. But bigger than this is that sellers are more abusing this facility by charging higher vat rates than actual. For e.g. VAT rate on Digital Cameras is 4% but some sellers are charging 8%, 10% and 12.5%. Some Sellers are charging 10% VAT for IT products where VAT is only 4%. This again creates a non level playing field. Honest sellers are also compelled to adopt such underhand techniques to stay competetive. A simple solution is to do away with the vat functionality all together.


3) Sales are down to a all time low. You can read sellers views in the community thread:

"http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?threadID=600002210"

You can possibily comment on reasons for such poor sales and efforts to increase them.

4) There is one issue which I have been meaning to discuss wtih ebaY for a long time.

ebaY brands itself as a destination where it can get products at the lowest prices, e.g. the recent promos of PDA phones and Digital Cameras at lowest prices.

You project yourself as a discount store but expect sellers to provide service of the highest levels? How is that possible. Either you are a discount store with discounted services or a a luxury boutique where all sorts of luxury treatment is available to buyers.

No one going to the "Sabse Saste 7 Din", expects tremendous levels of service. They stand in queues for hours to enter the store, buy in overcrowded conditions and queue up again for an hour or so just to make payment.

However on your site, if a seller has to make a sale he is expected to sell the product at the lowest price possible and you expect your sellers to offer unbeleiveable level of service, like having 4.5% DSR just to maintain a PS level. Isn't this a little contradictory?

5) The New PaisaPay has made a royal mess of things, there are many threads on this board regardging this but I will not comment on the same. However there is one issue which is increasing our workload tremendously. There is no way to print correct shipping labels which buyers phone numbers. You charge us Rs.200/- plus service tax for something called a selling manager which does not even give us this basic functionality. We work on other sites where we can print upto 50 shipping lables with just on command. Here to print one lable takes a huge amount of effort. I think instead of charging sellers for SM, you should be actually paying sellers an amount for all the work they have to do just to print a shipping label.

-------

Devesh

[indianherbalsandhenna]

Hi Rajan

I congratulate you on achieving the great Milestones in the year 2007 and wish you the very best to maintain the same in the coming year.

My view points

New Paisa Pay - what i would say about the new paisa pay is if the paypal can not be brought into India than Paisa pay should work just like the paypal works or can be similar to that if not same. But imposing restriction like delivery times is not fair at all. Workload as sellers had written has been increased tremendously. Sellers can not concentrate on selling as they have to mess up with the new paisa pay by now and then.

Global Trade -
1. Since the new paisa pay has been launched there was big drop down in International Sales. Sellers like me and many other are diverting to paypal. As most of the Indian Sellers are sending good thru Registered Post of India Post and it takes 15-30 days for delivery depending upon the location. So Again the New Paisa pay becomes a Great Hurdle in the International Trade.

LIsting Internationally
As Every Indian seller is allowed to List a Scheduled Listing on ebay.in and till now its free. But why any Indian Seller is not allowed to list a Scheduled listing on any other International ebay site. What i would suggest that all Indian sellers should be allowed to List a Scheduled Listing (although it is paid) so that they can manage the time implications in the selling on other sites. As listing ending time matters a lots on the International Sites as well.

Earlier ebay.in was very supportive and easy for the sellers like me who are totally into international sales. But now selling on other sites with paypal is the much better option.

You should take all this into consideration so that sellers should list more on ebay.in

Regards

sachin sood
Punjabimall

[veedeedirect]

Hello Rajan,

The VAT issue has been discussed on the community boards many times.

http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?messageID=600017626

http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?messageID=600014024

http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?messageID=600011595

Without a single response from ebay to this. I am hopefull I get a response this time.

I was just browing the ebay.de site and saw that sellers input their VAT numbers on the listings. Since I do not read German, I am not sure if this is mandatory or not.
I do not know what stops you from making this mandatory for the Indian site as well.

However the most simplest solution is to do away with the VAT functionality all together. No other Indian site charges VAT separately. This also mars the buyer experience, have multiple cost like VAT and Shipping added to this final sale price.

Just image seeing an item at Rs.99/- than having Rs.60/- s&h added to it and than having 12.5% VAT added bringing the final total to Rs.179/-. i.e. 80% higher than what he had bargained on paying.

------------

Devesh

[runalaila_in1]

Dear Rajan bhai
Many have congratulated you about achievements and also wished you great success moving ahead

So i'll come direct to highlighting a good policy announced by Ebay.com
and thought it would be APT if paisa pay took a note of it and perhaps implement it here too ... Fine tuning the new paisa pay thereby helping out a number of smaller sellers who do not have Express remittance facility

Here's the announcement on .com

for a small number of these transactions paid with PayPal, when eBay suspects the transaction may result in a dissatisfied customer, PayPal will delay release of the payment funds to the seller until the buyer has left a
positive feedback OR 21 days have passed without a dispute.

Translating the same rule to our paisa pay ... perhaps paisa pay could start releasing funds if a positive is given
before the deadline date
as many buyers simply think leaving positive feedback is enough and dont think it worthwhile to log again and also confirm reciept of items ...

[pc_gaming_store]

Forgot to add: PaisaPay is full of bugs (as mentioned by previous fellow eBayers)

So I won't reiterate the problems. Just that it is affecting the way we do business and the problems have not been fixed.

Either you are short of engineers or if you do have enough engineers, I must say the great ones are not with you.

[pc_gaming_store]

And please pay close attention to Swarup's oint:

I would request eBay to be less dictatorial and feel the pulse of the community.

Please discuss and get some feedback from the community before introducing some drastic change.

Lastly, when you discuss something please be flexible to change other wise there is no point in discussing on a stubborn rule.

Hope you will agree that we, the members, also have some sense of logic and management and spend much more time on ebay compared to the meager profit many of us earn thru it.

[snrama]

Hi Mr. Rajan Mehra,

Its nice to see you on boards once again.

Congratulations! for introducing so many new systems in eBay India. But even I am unhappy with the New PaisaPay system.

As said by Mr. Swarup. The New PaisaPay has a lot of bugs and its been a long time that it hasn't been fixed.

We are facing low sales, paying high fees for PaisaPay and PaisaPay isn't offering other payment gateways like Axis Bank, where other portals are offering it.

Though the EMI Option was introduced on buyer's benefit, Why the EMI facility fee charged for seller? It should be charged to buyer like other portals.

Please Implement the system from good opinions and suggestions which were discussed on the community boards.

I hope to see that the stress gets reduced to seller and hope we to get some benefit of our hard work. ---------------
With Regards,
Navaneeth (snrama) 😉

[elexzone]

Dear Sir,

We have issues with Ebay's Item not as discribed policy. We mention in listing buyer should notify item not as discribed within 7 working days once they receive product. But ebay has given 60 days time for claim to buyer. Many time buyer mishandle product and if he feel he is tired of using the product simply open dispute and to keep buyers satisfaction we have to refund full. In all cases buyer never agree to accept even shipping back charges and we end up with big losses. You should consider changes in this policy and the reporting period should not be too long but a few days max 7 days because if the product has any problem or not as discribed in listing buyer can know the next day he receive the product.

Thank you