‘India a priority market for eBay’
NEW DELHI : EBay, an online marketplace for buyers and sellers, generates 50% of its revenue from markets outside the US. India, which is classified under emerging markets, has remained an important market for eBay despite the company exiting the market in 2017. In an interview, Vidmay Naini, eBay’s general manager for global emerging markets, which include India and Southeast Asia, spoke about the challenges faced by India’s e-commerce exporters and the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce ventures.
Edited excerpts: Often, there is a lot of baggage to the eBay narrative. We do not operate in the domestic market at this point in time—in 2017, we exited the domestic market in India and sold our India business to Flipkart. So, starting in 2018, one of our consistent strategies has been to focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) exports.
This essentially entails Indian sellers selling (products) to the world. We’ve been enabling this for more than a decade, where we’ve enabled Indian sellers to sell to our co-sites in the US, the UK, Germany and mainland Europe. This has been our focus in India since 2018, and we’ve had a robust, scalable and strong business emerging out of here.
India is one of our priority markets and is definitely among the top five of 180 countries under eBay’s emerging markets division. ‘Exports’ has become a buzzword in the past couple of years. We have been in this business for the past 10 years.
Through my time, we’ve seen plenty of challenges in foreign trade and exports in India—be it procedural or otherwise. Most of them, at a policy level, have been solved to a large extent in the past four to five years. Now, with the new Foreign Trade Policy coming in, there’s a strong
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