Changing the ecommerce dynamics for SMBs Date:   Monday , March 05, 2012 Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer, eBay India The internet scenario in India has undergone a rapid change. There are about 100 million internet users today and the numbers are growing at a rapid rate. Internet is becoming more central in the lives of the consuming class in India. By 2015 the internet usage will rise to around 350 million people. Within this rapid pace of growth of the internet, the ecommerce has grown extensively especially over the last 18 months. This growth is actually driven by two or three large factors. 1. The number of internet users 2. The quality of internet devices (Broadband, 3G devices etc.,) 3. The infrastructure system in India around ecommerce (payment systems, logistics) and the safety that people perceive doing transactions via internet. This is a factor that is changing quite rapidly in the consumer’s mind. Overall, there is a rise in the disposable income and a willingness to try out new categories and niche products, a critical factor driving this trend. There are a lot of new players entering ecommerce. Investments are carried out in different aspects of ecommerce such as fulfillment services, fashion, baby care, technology and more. All of these aspects are opening up options to Indian consumers to tap into ecommerce and will continue to exist in the coming years as the market is said to double every year. This is the situation from a broad ecommerce perspective. From an eBay perspective, there are a lot of positives that are happening because of all the above mentioned aspects. eBay is essentially a market place platform which enables Indian entrepreneurs to connect with the Indian consumer demand. What we are seeing over the last few months is that, while there has been an upsurge in the consumer’s interest in buying products online, a lot of that interest has translated into consumers buying products from our own site. More importantly for us, many entrepreneurs are now ready to try out internet as an alternate medium for their sales. And many of the entrepreneurs who are part of the value chain in the offline market have realized the importance of internet market. eBay provides the largest internet traffic in the ecommerce segment in the country today. And we at EBay provide a platform for the entrepreneurs to experience and become a part of the ecommerce boom. This has been a great positive for us over the last 12 months. All of these categories put together, entrepreneurs would want to use eBay as a platform for their business because of the traffic and consumer demand that is generating in eBay. Ecommerce is now not limited only to the urban centers but also the rural centers. It obviously presents itself with lot of challenges in terms of the products travelling to 3300 different locations. There are also bright points with the same. 1. The fact that, the demand is actually coming from so many different places. 2. The ability of ecommerce to serve this demand. The advantage we find here is that, the buyers from all these places are fully aware of the products that are available in the internet market which may not be the same case with offline markets. The only way we can fulfill their demand is through online medium which is why we see a lot of such transactions happening. Our sellers come from all regions across India. While the big cities are concentrated much, the seller base we have is from more than thousand locations in India. The eBay model, while it capitalizes on the scattered demand, it also services the scattered demand because we have supply points across the country too. eBay tries in reaching out to the merchants who are part of the offline merchant chain and offer eBay as a mechanism for them to sell their products. We have a dedicated telephonic based program in order to help these merchants to come on to eBay. Hence, most of the marketing is either one to one or via telephone to use eBay as a platform for business. The innovative strategy we have used in the past twelve months is entirely our social media outreach. We already have about one and a half million people as fans in our social media page. This is among the highest fan bases among various corporate that are playing in India and definitely among the top one or two as far as ecommerce is concerned. We have noticed that social medium is a fantastic medium to acquire and engage with the customers by getting feedbacks from them in terms of what they like and what they do not like. We have used facebook as a method to introduce new categories of products online. I believe that, any activity that has been associated with ecommerce is good as a market because the growth upside is huge. There is definitely place for multiple players as long as they are bringing specific value to the table in terms of prices, service levels, uniqueness of inventory etc., and eBay as a market place model will only gain as the market keeps maturing, more and more entrepreneurs will get online and eBay will ultimately be one of the first option they would use. For 2012, we look forward to see more and more merchants join us by bringing more variety into business. We are looking at consumers by making them aware of the depth that is available in the online market place i.e., eBay. We are hoping to grow faster than the growth we achieved last year. We are going to be aggressive for both merchants and buyers in terms of making them aware of the benefits of our platforms with the demand that is available on our side and also the supply that exist within us. (As told to Vishwas Nair)