Ebay = "Exploitaion Of Sellers and Free Goodies To Attract New Buyers”

[mumbaimantra]

Dear ALL,

At the end of the day we sellers feel that Ebay doesn’t care about it’s sellers, their main aim is just to exploit fees from sellers in one way or other. Ebay thinks all the sellers are earning millions by selling products on ebay, so paying few thousand extra to ebay would be piece of cake for them. But that is not the case. As per my experience at the end of the month our profit is meagre 50% of ebay fee (considering service charges of CC & OBT + 10% Service Tax). Now if ebay is asking us to pay fees before hand for incomplete deals I was not at all surprised, because that’s the motto of Ebay “ Exploitaion Of Sellers and Free Goodies To Attract New Buyers”.

By this time you all sellers must have realised that selling on Ebay is a time consuming process & it is not as easy as it was with baazee. So our workload has gone up by 200%-300%. To reduce the workload I though I should keep all my products for only paisapay buyers so I do not have to waste time for UPI. But guess what ebay’s buying procedure is so intelligent that it doesn’t ask the buyer to select the payment method, in its first stage. And most of the buyers (That’s my experience) just disappear after that , they never go to the second stage. I really thing ebay thinks all sellers have plenty of time to waste on Ebay or as I said before all sellers are earning millions so they must be having employees to help them do the things on ebay.

Next innovative idea ebay (baazee) implemented is “Paisapay service charges will be inherent now”, by hiding the paisapay service charges from buyers & putting it on sellers head , they feel that buyer’s will be happy , and Seller’s they do not have right to be unhappy because they is no competition to ebay. So sellers do not have choice , they just have to bear with whatever rules ebay will force on them . The major disadvantage of this system was now buyers feel ebays prices are higher than local market. (5% fees+3% CC). So retaining a buyer has become very difficult now, Many of my buyers bluntly said to me on my Face “Ebay is not cost effective any more”. And that is true as face value has gone up. All of you just think “Will you go to a Petrol Pump who charges Rs. 49 per litre(as CC charges are inherent), or would you prefer to go to pump where Petrol is available at Rs. 44.50 as CC charges are applied only to CC buyers. So at the end of the day even offline buyers has to pay service charges for not having CC.

Another innovative idea of Ebays guys is they do have dropped Order Ids, They ask us to work with item ids. So now if we have to uniquely identify an order we have to combine Item id & Ebay Id. Which is again a tricky thing as a same buyer can order same item twice. So this system of identifying an unique order is not perfect.

Ebay is alive today because they do not have competition. And last but not the least “Ebay is Pathetic , Baazee was excellent”.

Thanks you all, if you have read all the above lines. I am closing my business on ebay as it is not worth investing time any more. So my advice to you all would be to write to rediff & indiatimes. Check out if you can sell on their sites or just get one 10 to 6 job, that will give you more money & peace of mind as well. (As your ebay business increase Ebay might ask you to pay 50k before hand for it’s invoice).

Regards And God Bless You All. (Rather God Saves You All, you know from whom).

Ketan S.

[sapl4all]

Dear Friends

MumbaiMantra is absolutely right ,

I support all his views. Especially his statement that the motto of Ebay “ Exploitaion Of Sellers and Free Goodies To Attract New Buyers” is absolutely true. Just check out now ebay.in is offering Hyundai Getz Car worth Rs. 5 Lakh + free of cost, for a newly registered lucky winner. Have they ever thought of offering A Scooter to a seller as an incentive who has done a whopping business in any given month. Forget scooter , they will not even offer bicycle to sellers. Instead encouraging seller , they will appoint special person rather recovery officer to call up seller everyday and recover fee from him. They will never think about the sellers as MM has said “ ebay.in guys think sellers are earning million” . Retaining a client (either buyer or seller) is not part of their strategy. They just want to concentrate all their efforts to attract new buyers & sellers. But what about client retention. They do not want to do any efforts in that. When first time I had registered myself on indiatimes , they just sent me discount coupons for few weeks , Finally I decided to use these coupons. And I became regular buyer on indiatimes. Even today if I do not purchase on indiatimes for few months, I receive these discount coupons , and I again purchase just to use these coupons. Excellent Idea of Indiatimes. But our ebay.in guys do not scratch their heads because may be they just have to show it to their bosses that ebay.in has so many new registered users. Whether these users are really regular visitors to ebay.in or not is not their concern.



About the new ebay.in it is not at all worth investing time. It’s not at all user friendly. In fact it is absolutely rediculous as compared to baazee.com. If ebay.in thinks they can implement all their American policies in India, they are making a big mistake. In India people do not prefer to buy on net.

No wonder India exports so many programmers to USA as it is evident from ebay.in that Americans do not have logic.

All this Invoice Thing , reminds me of Lagaan movie. Barish (Rain) aur no Barish Ebay.in just wants its LAGAAN whether deal materialises or not is not their concern. Only difference in movie the boss was British and here the boss is American.

If we sellers can unite we can fight all this. So come on seller brothers (Big & small ),

There is strength in Unity, Let’s fight ebay.in together.

Regards to all.

[rohit@ebay.com]

Hello,

Posting this on behalf of John from the Category Management Team at eBay India. John is on holiday right now, but he wanted to post a reply to this discussion. He has emailed me his message, that I am posting on his behalf.

Hello MumbaiMantra, Sapl.co.in

Thanks for taking the time to put forth your feedback and suggestions. I'll do my best here to respond to key areas - but most importantly I want to assure you that eBay does care. For example, your input here has been forwarded to key product and marketing folks in the team to react to. This is just the beginning - every time we look at product features and enhancements we include the community, often times inviting panels of buyers and sellers into the office to participate in the development process.

Here goes with some ideas..

1) Fees - eBay simply cannot succeed if our sellers can't afford the marketplace. The seller fee structure in place (both PaisaPay and the marketplace) are there to both increase the marketplace health by influencing market behavior and to fund our efforts to attract and retain buyers. Without fees we simply couldn't build the tools and attract the traffic. I agree, margins on certain types of product are tight - selling on eBay is certainly more profitable for certain types of products - maybe used items, items that nobody else has (and buyers all want), etc. I encourage you to always bee looking for that unique supply that will drive most to your bottom line.

2) Selling process & workload - I'm eager to hear more details from you here. We're hearing interesting signals from the community on this topic... seller tools, for example, have been praised in our discussions with sellers as a dramatic improvement over baazee listing uploads. Tied to this, site listings (net of duplicates) is up dramatically. This said, we know there are new steps in the process that didn't exist on baazee. We view every additional step in the selling process with careful consideration - weighing incremental benefits of a better listing (i.e. attributes) against the seller workload required for any additional step. For example, a new SYI form will be globally released in coming months to give sellers the option of a faster listing process if they wish to skip adding certain information.

I agree, Order IDs has been a pain point we're trying to address. We're learning that in India, more sellers sell 'multi-item auctions' than other markets, and we're working to adapt to this. The Selling Manager tool has functionality to help with this. We're also looking at further enhancements to the post-sale management such as adding phone numbers to shipping labels, etc.

3) Buyer flow on payment method - This is an interesting suggestion that I've passed to our product team to look into. My guess is that this flow is a balanced decision on whether to bring the buyer further in the flow before popping the payment question - which leads to different drop off rates, and UPI rates as well. We are building a wealth of website traffic data that we hope to learn from to optimize all the buyer flows. We'll look into this.

4) Buyer acquisition vs. retention - this is a huge topic. Both are important. Here at eBay, we call them "Acquisition" "Activation" and "Activity" - the "eBay triple A"

Acquisition - Here in India, we think nearly 20,000 new internet users log in each and every day. This is HUGE! We cannot ignore the opportunity to bring these new buyers to eBay as quickly as possible, to educate them about how to safely buy and sell on the web and discover the vast product offerings and great deals offered by sellers.

Activation - Registering a member is just the beginning. Actually getting users to bid and buy is the next challenge. Having great sellers with great value products is critical. Things like paisapay, feedback, and smooth product flows also help.

Activity - This is where it gets exciting! I love watching trends where we see buyers experiment at first to win a paisa auction on a book, for example, but come back for a laptop, then start to use eBay monthly to buy just about everything they need - even a car! Generally speaking, we go after this activation with both marketing and savvy product development. In mature markets we even use TV advertising. Above all, a pleasant buying experience is the critical factor - hence we see seller education as so important.

Sometimes we use coupons - however keep in mind that to keep our fees low, eBay has significantly lower margin structures than other sites, which may actually hold the inventory they sell or have a reselling agreement that gives them significantly greater profit per item sold.

Technology and product functionality is by far the most leveraged long term activity driver. Tools like "my eBay", "favorite searches", "favorite sellers", "alerts", and the eBay toolbar work to remind people to come back to eBay again and again. There is simply no other marketplace in India that comes close to such powerful tools... This said I admit we have a long way to go, however, to make sure our users KNOW and USE these functions.

This is where you, the seller, come in. We need your help, and furthermore, this is how you, can control your destiny... Tell buyers about these tools! You can remind your buyers to add you to their 'favorite search'. You can use tools like 'seller email marketing'. As you look at other sellers, note the difference between their unique feedback and total feedback score - those with a big difference have strong repeat customer activity.. maybe there is something to learn from their strategy.

We're never done finding more ways to keep buyers coming back - This year, we've been working with the community to develop some really cool functionality on the way that we think will be especially powerful retention drivers - stay tuned!

Let me close, by assuring you (and any of you lurkers out there 😉 ) that eBay is alive today because of a vibrant, engaged community - here in India and around the world.

We would be fooling ourselves if we thought that buyers and sellers didn't have a choice - and that is why we truly care about the success of our sellers and the delight of our buyers.

Here in India, we're just getting started. I think there is some history to be made, and I encourage you to continue your entrepreneurial spirit and open mind towards building the vision.

Keep the ideas coming!

-John

[personalityshapers]

Hello , I totally agree with mumbaimantra.

even I find it wastage of time & money working with ebay. on every step we are asked to pay fees.
I really miss my good time in baazee.sales have gone down.
BIGGEST DRAW BACK..NO SELLER SUPPORT. IF WE HAVE ANY PROBLEM , WE ARE AT THE MERCY OF " CONTACT US " LINK. WE GET ONLY IS DIPLOMATIC ANSWER.
SURLY i WILL LOOK FOR SOME OTHER WEBSITE. IT MORE HEADACHE NOW , WASTE OF SELLEWR MONEY & LESS PROFIT & LESS SALES.

GOOD LUCK EBAY ..IN iNDIA.
SONI

[manojelectricals]

I agree with Mumbai Mantra. Obviously ebay.in does not have its ear on the ground. Waxing platitudes about how they care about sellers is not going to help. They need to show it.
The first and the biggest threat that a seller faces on ebay (which was not there in baazee) is the rating process. A seller is totally at the mercy of the buyer for the rating. If a buyer makes a purchase on ebay, does not buy the product because he has changed his mind or whatever other reason and still leaves a neutral and negative rating, then ebay considers it the seller's headache to get the rating withdraw. And even after a seller chases with the buyer, but if the latter is not willing to change the rating or is unaware of how to use the mutual withdrawal process, then the seller is still stuck.
And this new concept of online support is nonsense. We are talking India here guys. How many people are so tech savyy that they will know which processes and forms to follow up for their problems. Also, if they are using dial-up connections, why would they bother blocking their bandwidth to edit ratings by going thru numerous forms. The buyer will simply decide to forget the affair, but the seller will be screwed all over again.
If ebay wants to give its users a goos buying experience, they can rely on the rating process like baazee did. Rather than asking sellers to resolve every negative and neutral rating, why not ask sellers to maintain a good ratio of positive and negative rating? This system seemed to work well with baazee, why should it not work with ebay.in
Though ebay is internationally bound to the some global processes, there is no reason why it can't be made flexible for certain countries. Why can't ebay.in emulate some of the functions of baazee, if this translates in time and effort saving to the sellers and the buyers?
Another grudge that a lot of partners have is about account suspension. If a seller's account is suspended, then why is he not given access to the items he has sold before the date of suspension? HOw can he file UPI for those items he had sold earlier? And if he can't file the UPI due to no fault of his, why should he pay ebay fat fees for transactions that never took place.
Unless ebay addresses these problems it is going to lose a lot of reputed sellers. Sellers will find other portals to sell from or will rely on their over the counter sales. But what will ebay do then? Also, if sellers refuse to pay outstandings how is ebay.in going to explain it to the ebay community and its global management? Is it simply going to say, that this is how Indians are and wash their hands off their own inefficiencies and short sightedness?