MUMBAI: If Indians are expected to shop for goods and services worth Rs 2,300 crore this financial year, almost twice of what they did last year, then what exactly are they spending their money online for?
eBay India, the Indian arm of auction site eBay.com, one of the most popular shopping websites, on Wednesday released some trends of its consumers. According to Ambareesh Murty, director - category management - eBay India, the most searched item by keyword on the site is ‘trains’, even though the company doesn’t sell any trains, the real ones that is! ‘Ipod’ is the second most searched item, with ‘railway ticket’ (another service the site doesn’t provide), ‘Nokia’, and ‘tickets’ being the other items on the top 5 list.
Mobile and accessories are the largest selling products on the site with one selling every 7 minutes. By value, auto is the biggest segment, with about three cars and four bikes changing hands a day.
Nokia and Sony Ericsson are the most popular brands amongst ebay’s 2 million registered users in India. A mobile accessory sells every 18 minutes and the quickest to ship are data cables and handsfree kits.
Murty says for over 7 lakh people in the US, ebay is their primary or secondary source of income. For India, the corresponding figure is a few thousand.
Globally, an average buyer from the site is between 25 and 55 years of age, is value oriented, and earns between $25,000-$80,000 a year. Average buyer in India is younger, between 18 and 40 years of age, and many are from Tier II and Tier III towns.
On the seller side, businesses that depend upon ebay for significant proportion of their revenue, they have 2-5 employees to dedicatedly service customers from site channel. ebay earns money by charging a slab based (5% for amount up to Rs 4,000 and 2% for every thousand thereafter) fees from the seller.
According to Janhavi Jasraj, business head, Wespro Corp, her company derives about 40% revenues from selling MP3 devices and digital cameras from ebay, in spite of having a physical presence in many retail outlets across the country. She has five people who only look after the ebay business.
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