Open Discussion with Rajan Mehra, Country Manager, eBay.in, 18 July 4-5 PM

[sapana@ebay.com]

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

[parle.d]

Respected Mr. Mehra,

I am a fairly new purchaser on eBay and I must say that even though the convenience of shopping is reduced to just a click of a button, the danger of receiving unsatisfactory goods still persists. I have bought so far 3 items over your portal and the last one, meant to be a gift, is in not exactly the state it claims to be in. I have asked for a replacement but seemed like the vendor was "too busy" to deal with things that could harm his reputation, and therefore, reputation of eBay. (I am referring to item# 110146281056)

Something (or someone?) must be done in circumstances like this, that needs immediate customer redressal.

Thankyou and all the best in your endeavors.
God bless.

Best,
Pearl D'Sa

[sapana@ebay.com]

Dear Members,

A warm welcome and thanks for joining us today in this discussion.

Today we have Rajan Mehra, Country Manager, eBay India with us. Rajan will be with us for next one hour and will be answering your questions on buying and selling on eBay. To post your question, thoughts or comments, please click on the Post a reply button (on top or bottom of the page). Rajan will start with answering to previously posted questions.

Please welcome Rajan to the boards and here we get started...

Regards,
Sapana
Community Development Team

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Wow! The number of posts is really encouraging. Thanks for taking the time to be here today. I recognize that each of you has taken time out from your schedule to be here today and I really appreciate that. Given that we have 60 minutes, I’ll try and cover as many posts as possible in the next hour. To the extent that we have some unanswered posts I’ll make sure I get to them soon and have the replies posted onto the boards. Let me get to the questions…
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi skygiftworldwide

Thanks for your kind words - I’m glad to hear that you find the new features useful. Personally, I’m really excited by the introduction of the Shopping Cart which will allow buyers to buy multiple items in one buying session. Also, as you correctly state one of the big benefits of the Shopping Cart will be to reduce the incidence of UPI, which is sometimes onerous for sellers.

As regards your question on item availability in the Shopping Cart, if a buyer does not pay for items in the Shopping Cart immediately, the items will remain in the cart until they become unavailable on the site. i.e., it is bought by some other buyer or the item ends on its own.

Also, Sandeep from our product team informs me that he plans to conduct a fun ‘I Know eBay’ contest to help our sellers learn all about Shopping Cart and other site changes. I hope you will have lot of fun in the contest, and learn all about the site changes.

Thanks
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi Indconcepts,

Thank you for your invaluable advice for the community and eBay from time-to-time – it’s great to have you on the boards again.

I appreciate your kind words on the team’s efforts. As regards your comment on change at a faster pace, we recognize the need for more rapid turnaround of product features and have been making some important architectural changes to ensure that we are in a position to reduce the time to market for new features that we’d like to introduce locally. Our roll-out of the Shopping Cart functionality and immediate payments has been done using this new flexible method of product development.

That said, we operate on a global platform and have the benefits of excellent best-in-class in e-commerce functionality that is being developed for markets where we’re really focused on optimizing the end-to-end user experience. We also have the benefit of a large number of global buyers buying from India sellers which is another big advantage of this platform. Being on a global platform means that you sometimes need to trade-off time-to-market for the other benefits. As I mentioned above, we are in the process of making a few changes which will allow us to also reduce time to market.

While on the subject I’d be interested in understanding if sellers such as yourself would use seller-funded coupons?
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi jaipur_fashions,

Thanks for posting! I always look forward to hearing from regular board members.

I read on the boards that your daughter had outstanding SSC results :-). Do congratulate her on our behalf.

I understand your concern on the topic of a seller getting lot of false feedbacks. As regards your TnS concern, I understand that the team has already taken appropriate action. Just to give you a perspective on how the TnS team works – whenever we get a report, the team investigates to ensure that the report is correct and double checks to ensure that the violation is genuine. Then, as the case may be, the user is sent a warning or asked for explanation. A user is normally given 48 hours to respond and more than one attempt is made to contact the user. If a user is not contactable or does not respond, only then we take action against a user. I agree that this is a slow process, but it also helps us ensure that we do not hurt the interests of a legitimate user. Also, please allow me to take this opportunity to ensure you that every complaint or mail received by the team is reviewed and actioned. We are not always able to tell you the action that we have taken, but we always look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for your suggestion on Phone support for all buyers. As you might be aware, the CS team will be soon launching phone support for all PaisaPay transactions. We are sure that this endeavor will help us cover a significant amount of buyer issues. At the same time, some time back we started phone calls to buyers who file for disputes to ensure that they are aware of the dispute and buyer protection process. We will continue to learn from these experiences and will further evaluate on how we can serve our buyers better.

Thanks very much for your appreciation. Your words of encouragement truly motivate us.
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi bijibuys,

I am sorry to hear that you had a bad experience on eBay. As you might know eBay has a Buyer Protection program in place which protects our buyers against such situations. I understand my colleague from TnS has already reached out to you explain you the process of filing for Buyer Protection.

Also, thanks for reporting the incident. This will help us in taking action against the seller. We work closely with various police departments to ensure that any fraudulent activity on eBay does not go unpunished.

Once again we truly appreciate your usage of eBay and we hope that this one experience will not deter you.
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi ashish-verma,

Thanks for buying on eBay and I hope that you continue to enjoy your eBay experience. We are especially committed to improving your experience on the site.

As regards your comment on shill bidding – this is expressly not allowed on eBay and is strictly monitored by us. On occasion, a seller may get away with it, but I would suggest that for the most part our team has a good track record of identifying shill bidding patterns.

I might point out that sometimes buyers assume that sellers are shill-bidding when this is in fcat not the case. This happens most often when a bidder has selected an item and placed ‘auto bid’ on the item. The auto bid functionality allows buyers to specify an amount upto which the system will auto bid on the buyer’s behalf. While this is very helpful feature for buyers, at times it can give an impression that the seller could be possibly shill bidding. I wonder if this may explain the cases you’re talking about.

Thanks.
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Hi snrama,

First of all, hearty congratulations on your 1000th feedback! I believe it is an important milestone and I hope you can soon join the 10,000 feedback club :).

Also, thanks for your kind words. All our efforts are supplemented by the excellent products and service that good sellers such as yourself provide our buyers.

I am glad that you liked the various promotions. The team is planning to send winning certificates to the winners of the contest.
Best Regards
Rajan

[rajanmehra@ebay.com]

Dear wellness_store,

I understand your concern and have asked the TnS team to review your concern again and you can expect to hear from them shortly.
Best Regards
Rajan