Open House Discussion with Gautam Thakar, Director – Categories & Marketing

[rohit@ebay.com]

Dear Users,

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new initiative for users to interact with eBay India Management – the eBay India Open House.

Staff from the eBay India Management Team will be available on the Discussion Boards at pre – defined times, to answer any questions you might have regarding buying and selling on eBay India.

The first session is with Gautam Thakar, Director – Categories & Marketing. We invite you to join Gautam for an online chat on Thursday, the 2nd of June, 2005, from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM IST.

You can submit your questions before or during the event by making a post on this thread. For help on using the discussion boards, please click here (http://forums.ebay.in/thread.jspa?threadID=300000542).

See you on the 2nd at 5:00 PM!

Regards,
Rohit,
Community Development Team

[gautam@ebay.com]

Product Issues

I am happy to say that we are working on fixing the issue of outstation buyers selecting local shipping option. Once this is developed, tested, and rolled out, you can offer different delivery charges for local and national shipping, and the system will automatically display the relevant options to the buyer.

It was interesting to read the post that the site is becoming seller centric from some buyers and that its becoming a buyer centric site from some sellers:-). In some ways this is as it should be as we try and balance the needs of both. On a more serious note, we fully realize that without buyers, there will be no sellers on the site. Our attempt is to build a true marketplace where both buyers and sellers can trade with the same ease. But since sellers are more involved with the site, and typically spend many hours a day on the site, it is likely that we hear more feedback from sellers than buyers. Even our sellers will agree that more satisfied buyers will result in more business for them.
We would like to hear more from our regular buyers. I would encourage more of you to use the discussion boards to discuss with fellow buyers and sellers, and with us.

The feedback system is one which works consistently across all the eBay markets worldwide. edinamani – with respect to your question on unique feedback ratings, the answer is No, they are not equal. If you visit the Member profile page of a user, it also shows the total count of all positive feedback received. The feedback score reflects the number of unique positive transactions you have had with different members, which we feel, is a stronger indicator of the reputation of the user as compared to getting the same number of feedback from just one user. Regards
Gautam

[esource_in1]

Good Evening Gautam,

Going through all your posted replies most of our queries we had have automatically been answered.

Just one small invoice issue....When under promotion something is offered for free during a particular period why unnecessarly charge it first and then go through the process for the reversals to happen.

This double entry of debit and credit makes no sense and leads to lot on confusion when a seller tries to reconcile his/her accounts.

Rgds
Gurpreet Singh

[invogue-inc]

Gautam, quoting your post:

"I request you to please report such issues to us using the Contact Us Link in the following page - http://pages.ebay.in/help/policies/feedback-extortion.html

For more details of feedback abuse, click here - http://pages.ebay.in/help/policies/fdbk-feedback-abuse.html"

We can only say that you too are just following the other ebay India staff, which just theoretically copy-pastes and gives us such links as has been taught to them. But the truth is that we never receive a correct and satisfactory reply from them, and I am sure all users here will agree with me on this. There has to really be some way to sort this problem, and just emailing ebay does not seem to get the resolution.

[ppjewellers]

Hello Gautam, actually I no longer believe in posting on forums since no one listens. I would really appreciate if we can have a talk whenever you get free time. Would like to discuss on some points which can solve most of the major issues faced by both ebay and the ebay users. Hope to hear from you soon......

[gautam@ebay.com]

Dear ppjewellers,
My sincere apologies if no one has been responding to you from eBay. One of the reasons i am on the boards and we are getting more people fromour staff is to ensure that we hear directly from our users and not only through cutomer service. We are all going to do the best going forward to listen and help as much as we can. I have to say though that everything may not be possible as a lot of changes may affect users in other countries as well.

One thing i want to clarify though is that the boards should be used to raise issues which affect the broad community (and we have got some very good such issues in this session like 'outstation buyers selecting local' etc)
as also for users to help each other. For very specific cases i would still request you to write to customer support. I have taken note that you feel our responses are 'cut paste' and i will be working with that team to ensure that this changes. We will try to do this fast - but i do request your support and patience as we work to make this happen. Regards
Gautam

[silconvalley]

DEAR SIR
ONLY ONE QUESTION FOR NOW
ONE OF MY ID IS USA BASED I WHAT IT TO BE INDIAN WITH ALL CALCULATIONS IN RS. INSTAED OF $ CAN IT BE DONE I HAVE BEEN MAILING THIS TO THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT BUT NO SUPPORT IS RECEIVED with best regards
SILIKONINDIA

[gautam@ebay.com]

Customer Support

Answers not relevant to questions

Clearly this is an issue that has upset a lot of our users:-(. I do agree that it can be quite irritating to receive standard or irrelavant responses.There have been instances when some of our customers have either received incomplete or wrong answers from Support. We are very closely looking into this and have already in place a few processes and systems which would improve the responses one would receive.

At the time of launch of eBay India, there were a few initial site issues which were reported by our users. Initial Responses when such issues were reported are standardized. This might have upset some users. Majority of such site related issues have already been fixed. So we do not expect many more standard responses due to site issues.

We have also started sending survey questionnaires when our Customer Support is sending responses. This is to gather constant feedback aimed at improving our responses. The Quality Assurance team is working closely with the Customer Support team in improving the quality of responses.

I am going to take this up as a very important priority for our customer support team and n the coming weeks users would receive more personalised responses whereever applicable and we would be closely monitoring the feedback on the survey.

Power Seller Support – We are presently evaluating the concept of providing specialized support for Indian Power Sellers. We shall keep you posted on the developments. Regards
Gautam

[celebratinglove]

Dear Gautam,

I fear that you will hardly answer any genuinue concerns during this one hour :).

Quoting you in your previous Post:
"""It was interesting to read the post that the site is becoming seller centric from some buyers and that its becoming a buyer centric site from some sellers. In some ways this is as it should be as we try and balance the needs of both. On a more serious note, we fully realize that without buyers, there will be no sellers on the site. Our attempt is to build a true marketplace where both buyers and sellers can trade with the same ease. But since sellers are more involved with the site, and typically spend many hours a day on the site, it is likely that we hear more feedback from sellers than buyers. Even our sellers will agree that more satisfied buyers will result in more business for them.
We would like to hear more from our regular buyers. """

This proves that Ebay Team is Buyer Centric and have no idea regarding Marketing ideology.

First there should be a Product which should be good and Price should be Great.

If you are able to Achieve that then Buyers would automatically storm your site..once they buy something.

However, if the Sellers are treated like 3rd Grade Citizens ( Beggars cant be Choosers) then you can imagine what quality products or service would the seller be able to provide to the buyer.

YOU HEAR MORE FROM SELLERS BECAUSE THEY FIND EVERYTHING WRONG WITH EBAY INDIA NOW.X-(

YOU DONOT HEAR FROM BUYERS, BECAUSE THERE ARE HARDLY ANY... :^O

From your response it seems that it is nothing but a Diplomacy Session in Progress

The Turnout on the Board today is due to the Problems..

But If nothing is done..then Next time hardly anyone would waste Time typing on these...

I HOPE SOME GOOD SENSE PREVAILS SOON.

Regards,
Rajan
iGems
CelebratingLove

iGems
http://stores.ebay.in/iGemsIndia

CelebratingLove
http://stores.ebay.in/CelebratingLove

[gautam@ebay.com]

The scheduled session is supposed to end in 5 minutes but since i think that there are still a few important questions that are unanswered and you have all taken the time to come and talk with me , i am going to extend this by another 15-20 minutes. I will try and complete as much as possible in that time and if there is something that still remains i will request the community team to follow up. Regards
Gautam

[invogue-inc]

Quoting Gautam:

"Even our sellers will agree that more satisfied buyers will result in more business for them."

The truth is that by not letting buyer's edit their ratings even when the seller has done his all to satisfy him, even replaced or refunded the full amount in many cases, but is still stuck with the negative feedback. Below is a reply by a user to a thread on eBay USA:

Colleen, I know what you are asking and what I'm telling you is that it is MORE unethical for you to keep the money than the seller offering you $12 for your troubles.

The seller may have failed to provide what was advertised, in this case, he failed to provide you with the correct method of shipping, but when you contacted him, he provided you with a full refund plus shipping. He made you whole again AND let you keep the item. IMHO, he went FAR above and beyond to satisfy you and you refuse to be satisfied.

So, now he's offered you $12 ABOVE AND BEYOND what he's already paid out to you to satisfy you and even then you are looking for fault in this seller.

So, WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO SATISFY YOU?

The link to the above thread is:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=200102527&tstart=0&mod=1117706524942