On behalf of Rajan Mehra:
Hi everyone, this is Rajan Mehra, Country Manager for eBay India. I’d like to invite you to my next Open House discussion on Wednesday, 18th July 2007 from 4-5 PM IST.
At the outset I’d like to offer
a big thank you to our sellers for your enthusiasm and commitment in helping us improve the buyer experience on eBay. The fee change we implemented in April’07 has significantly helped us improve the quality of supply on our site, resulting in a better finding experience for buyers and more business for our sellers. As a result of this and other marketing initiatives, we have seen a rapid sales growth and for this I’d like to thank you.
Our community of sellers work tirelessly day-in and day-out to make eBay a great place to shop. Based on your feedback, we have introduced some product changes including requiring Immediate Payments to complete checkout and
other changes that will improve your experience on eBay.
Business at eBay is growing and I believe the
healthy growth trend shown by the e-commerce industry is a cause for optimism for all of us. ASSOCHAM, an industry body, has forecasted that the e-commerce market size will grow to Rs. 5500 crores in 2007 – 08 from its current Rs. 2200 crores.
I am also pleased to share with you some of the recent accolades received by eBay India. JuxtConsult, a third party research firm, has recognised eBay as the most popular shopping site for the third year in a row and also the most user friendly website. PC World Web Awards have recognised eBay India as the best auction website. I want to thank you for your support in helping us make this happen.
I’d like to take this opportunity to
revisit the priorities I’d set out for our team in January this year and measure the progress we’ve made so far:
1. A key priority we’d set out was to make our
site simpler and more convenient. We recently launched a
simplified buying flow for Fixed Price items and introduced a Shopping Cart. The exciting marketing campaigns like ‘Bid for a Buck’, ‘Cricket Mania’, ‘1 Rupee Free Shipping Auction block’ has further helped in a healthy growth rate in buyers, repeat buying and overall buyer satisfaction
The next steps towards making eBay simple, fun and convenient shall be a completely
new Home Page and
Phone Support for PaisaPay users.
2.
Providing a great experience to our buyers also means providing a safe and trustworthy trading platform. The TnS team has done lot of work in the past six months to ensure that bad buyer experiences are reduced. While they are proactively eliminating sellers who could cause bad experience, they are also ensuring that buyers who have a bad experience are reached out to and an appropriate resolution is provided to them under eBay’s Buyer Protection Program. We will continue to introduce measures that keep eBay a safe place to buy and sell.
3.
Global trade on the eBay platform has been growing rapidly and India is poised to gain significantly from this phenomenon. Many of you would have participated in the promotions that we run around International Listing Fee. In addition, we plan to improve the existing
Export Resource Centre, launch an all new Global Trade Tutorial and re-launch the International Selling Discussion Board.
4.
Getting more users aware and experienced about eBay is another of our key priorities. Since 35% of India’s population access the Internet from cyber café’s, we have successfully initiated a program where Internet users at Reliance World centres are educated and encouraged to buy on eBay. Today this channel has become a major contributor to new buyers on site. The current coverage spans 16 major cities and shall be further expanded in coming months. We are exploring ways and means to extend this infrastructure to get and support new sellers on the site.
Having said all of the above, I also know that there are lot of things we still need to do to deliver on a seamless experience for our buyers and sellers. I’ll be happy to discuss the same with you in the Open House discussion. You can post your question in advance on this thread, or join me on July 18th at 4 PM for a live discussion.
See you on the 18th!
Thank You,
Rajan Mehra,
Country Manager – eBay India
