Open House Discussion with Sharat Digumarti, 29th June 5 PM

[sapana@ebay.com]

Hi,

I am Sharat Digumarti, Senior Manager in charge of Marketplace Health for eBay India. Under this role, my team is responsible for Enhancing Trust and Safety and Investing in Seller Development on the site

We had met last February where we discussed many topics of interest of both buyers and sellers. I am back to give you some more updates on the Trust and Safety and on Seller Development front. Also, I will be available on June 29th 5-6 PM on this thread for an Open House discussion on the topics.

Trust and Safety Updates:

Enhanced Communication with Buyers in case of dispute – We want to ensure that our buyers who have filed a dispute, do not miss out on Buyer Protection claim. Thus, we have introduced enhanced support for buyers who file a dispute. With the new processes, any buyer filling a dispute will not only be regularly informed on the timelines, but will also be educated on the process to escalate the case for buyer protection claim.

Warranty Policy – In order to bring greater transparency in the warranty being offered in listings and to reduce ambiguity that leads to bad experiences between buyers and sellers, we introduced the Warranty Policy. This will ensure that all buyers are completely aware of the warranty that accompanies the product and thus will make an informed decision. It still early days to see any impact, however I am confident that in the coming week sellers would start abiding to this policy

Reduction in Unpaid Item disputes – I am glad to inform you all that the measures taken to reduce the Un-Paid items have borne good results. We have seen a consistent decline in site wide UPI rate. Some sellers have already reported a decline in their individual UPI rates. I hope all our sellers would have seen the benefit of the same.

Improvement in Seller Non Performance - I am glad to inform that we are doing certain changes in the SNP which would help genuine sellers. I will share more details on this during the open house session.


Seller Retention and Development Program

Business Badshah – The Business Badshah program was initiated to encourage sellers to increase their business. Some sellers have already received the benefit of the program. Most sellers will start seeing the credits in their account by next month. It was great to see an increase in business of many sellers. I hope you are as much proud of your improved performance as are we.

New Seller Support – Based on the feedback we have done some changes to our current program that helps new sellers in building their business on ebay. The changes include the period we proactively reach to new sellers and give guidance across all aspects of successful selling on ebay

Increasing feedback Adoption - Feedback is the cornerstone of the eBay Marketplace. We believe that feedback adoption by most buyers will greatly benefit genuine sellers. I am glad to inform that the various efforts taken over the past few months like, Detailed Seller Rating, Cricket Mania Promotion etc have greatly helped in increasing the number of buyers who are leaving feedback on site.

As I mentioned earlier, I will be present on the Community Boards for an Open House Session on 29th June 2007, 5 – 6 PM. I will encourage you to post your thoughts, comments and suggestion on this thread. I am looking forward towards this meeting and I hope to gather lot of useful feedback from you.

See you on 29th for Open house discussion!

Regards,
Sharat Digumarti
Senior Manager - Marketplace Health

[rashida_r]

hi sharat....
i want to sell my 4 paintings... i tried selling it on ebay but its still not sold.... wat m i suppose to do... i want to sell it at any cost... m in need of money ... hope u can help me out... bye

[blogram]

hello respected people, i am new to ebay but a compulsive online shopper , going through your site , i understood feedback is very important part for seller.
at the same time i see rampant mainpulations in new sllers gaining feedbacks through sister concerns
which is easily spottable by a new user like me
i got this seller on main page
http://cgi.ebay.in/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110136432819
the feedbacks can easily be spotted as ramped up
is this fair ?

[rediceauction]

Dear Sir,

Its pleasure writing you.

I am old ebay member but just started selling recently. I am selling mainly Ladies Lingeries and some electronics accessories too.

I am facing few problems and there are some issues which i would like to bring to your attention, may be same
shud be for some other sellers too.

1. I am selling lingeries, so many items i sell its shown on some model, and sometimes i get alert and listing gets deleted may be due to picture having some minor exposure.

2. But recently i got an alert and all of my listings were deleted, they were nearly 15-20 of them. At that same time there was one ipod accessory which was sold and paid by buyer thru paisa pay. Now since that item was deleted, paisa pay hold the payment. I contacted paisapay team and they replied they will come back in 2-3 days, but the payment was only released after more than 12 days, after contacting you by email and live chat.

3. Now another major problem in my ebay it shows i am selling 18 items, but in search it only shows 8 items that means nearly 10 items are not showing up in search, which i just realised recently...i had been relisting the item again and again and keep on paying ebay fees. I have send email to ebay and did live chat, but still this issue is not resolved... no one is telling clearly why the item is not showing up in search. They informed there will be some word in my listing which may be the cause of listing not showing up in search. Now how would i know which word it is ? there are hundreds of words in listing... in most of my listing i use similar words and even sellers of similar items use similar words. Hence we need your guidance to know exact cause of problem.
Selling item on ebay makes money for both of us and not only for seller.

4. Also another important issue which needs your attention and improvement is many buyers clicks on BUY button but then doesnt pay. By clickin on buy button means item sold and then ebay charges for final value fees immediately, but buyer doesnt pay us, and most of the time we cannot contact buyer as there is no phone number mentioned and only email id, and most of the time they dont respond to email. then we have to open dispute say after one week of waiting period and then have to wait another one week to close the dispute and get credit for final value fees.
This not only wastes time, but also wastes efforts and money and affects business.

5. Also many buyers done know about ebay ratings/stars and they dont leave feedback. See if something can be improved from your side on this. As we all know how important is ebay ratings.

I hope something is done to address my problems.

Wish you good luck and looking forward to see ebay growing by leaps and bounds in india as it is in other western countries.

Thanks.

Good Day.
Kuntal Shah
ozoneintl@gmail.com

[soniyadahar]

I am not sure if this is the right platform i am posting for this problem. Maybe readers may find it a bit difficult, but many a times we are in search of some value deal products as i just shop on ebay for getting products cheap rather than buying from the local marketplace. So i use the lowest price first option, whats cumbersome here is an item with Rs.1000 and free shipping comes in quite late and an item for Rs600 and Rs900 as shipping comes early, so i am making a loss in this case, as i have understood this i need to browse through a lot of pages and this is troublesome. So why not query the search on basis of final price including the shipping and postage. Thats easier too. And hopes it helps in unpaid items as i bid considering the mp3 player is for 999 and then after bidding i realise 999 is extra for postage. Moreover, when i am browsing for books, i need hard bound books and not ebooks, so i was utterly disappointed when all i could find in books section was ebooks. You should realize that many Indians like to read books during travel in flights, trains, etc and so ebooks are of little use to me. They may sell like hotcakes, but have a different sub category for them so i dont waste my time. Expecting a reply from you and a good return on the time i invested in writing this.
Regards,
Soniya

[ethnicraft]

Hi Sharat

Is this open house only for India based eBay members or can anyone join in? We're based in Thailand, which as you know only has a portal page rather than an active website, so being able to learn from other markets is essential to us.

Regards
Gaz

[snrama]

Hi Sharat,

Its pleasure to see you again at Open House Discussion. I have seen a lot of improvements like the eBay Top Menu Look, My World, Detailed

Seller Ratings, Warranty Policy etc..

Regarding the Reduction in Unpaid Item disputes, I have also seen a decline compared to previous month sales. Once "Immediate Payment

required" is out, it will be an extension for the reduction of UPI.

Business Badshah: A nice contest. But I personally think that no one should be disappointed with the prizes. At least an award certificate of

appreciation should be given to all participation. This will be a good encouragement to sellers.

Feedback: There are buyers who ignore the feedbacks. Sellers suffer a lot with this as each point is very important. Especially newbies. The

Cricket Mania Promotion was good, we need such good promotions again.

PaisaPay: I am happy that "Immediate Payment required" will be available soon. But PaisaPay also needs to accept more payment methods and its

right time now. Other Shopping Sites does offering some more gateways which are still unavailable with PaisaPay.

"Shipping Validation based on buyer Pin Code", "Locate Seller Contact Information easily" will be a cool feature once its up.

But I don't think "Fast Checkout for ‘Buy it Now’ Listings" is a good move. Just hoping that it will help both buyers and sellers by introducing it.

I have one query and it didn't get solved yet. My pin code is 560079 and the area is Basaveshwaranagar and city is Bangalore. The problem is eBay shows as it as UTTARAHALLI, KARNATAKA and charges National Courier to local/Bangalorean buyers. I don't want my buyers to pay more. Kindly fix this problem. ---------------
With Regards,
Navaneeth (snrama) 😉

[coolbrasco]

Dear Sharat,

Thanks for coming back again to discuss the issues. Definitely Safety and Trust team has made lot of safety for sellers and buyers, thanks for your hard work.

Regarding unpaid cased it has been reduced a lot. But in the month of Jan and Feb it was the great period, every sold item was almost paid. But after April it is again increased to 15-20 % unpaid cases. I hope you will take enough measures to cut down the unpaid items.

Regarding registration, some customer really enters dots, commas and register their identity and purchase items and go unpaid. I hope your team can control this kind of anonymous customers in the future. Please authorize every registration after reading the address and contents.

Tricky cheating by buyers

Another thing is same customer comes in different ID. From one ID they purchase and pay. Through another ID they purchase item and just don't pay. Later from the paid ID they go unregistered for some reason(Probably fake credit card purchase). Using another id with the purchased item they threaten the seller that item is not good and they want refund or they threaten saying going to leave negative feedback for the unpaid purchase, if we don't refund them (double way benefit, one side fake credit card purchase and another side refund !!!). I had one terrible case recently and some how i used another trick to escape from the troubling customer finally. When we report these cases the customer support does not understand the trick and never protect the sellers. Please protect us and help us.

There is another fraud case i have experienced recently. I don't want to discuss in group. Because other it is a bad example for other buyers too. How to report this kind of confidential cases. Most of the customer support staff does not understand the importance of the case and they write unwanted things and we are helpless. We need dedicated help from eBay by skilled staff, at least for PowerSellers.

Kind regards,
CoolBrasCo.

[sapana@ebay.com]

Hi All,

A warm welcome to today's Open house Session. Today we have Sharat here to answer your questions and have an open discussion on TnS and Seller development topics.

He will be here for an hour. Please feel free to ask any questions that you may have in mind.

Warm Regards,
Sapana

[yash@ebay.com]

Dear All

I am very excited to spend the next hour with you all sharing and taking different points of view
Regards

Yash