Adgully Exclusive | Growth rate in e-commerce to accelerate much faster: eBay's Kashyap Vadapalli

eBay, a place to buy, sell; a meeting place but not a store, a place to shop, a place to collect. It is actually the leading online marketplace for the sale of goods and services by a diverse community of individuals and businesses. eBay's mission is to help practically anyone trade anything on earth.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Kashyap Vadapalli, Director - Category Management, eBay India spoke about the insights and much more.

Speaking about the key highlights of eBay, he said, "It is a largest e-commerce company. EBay is an open market place; a platform where buyers and sellers can interact with each other. We provide a safe and secure platform for sellers to come and sell their products and at the same time we provide an easy finding experience, a wide range of products at great prices with easy check out flow for buyers which will help them with their online transactions."

eBay India had unveiled the eBay Census Guide 2011 sometime back. It confirmed that India is on the second position in terms of e-commerce. Telling about the key highlights of their census, he said, "Firstly, online shopping is mainstream in India, it is not limited to metros, top cities, technology products. India has more than 3300 e-commerce hubs from all the 28 states and 7 union territories. Top 5 states with maximum online transactions everyday are Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka & Andhra Pradesh respectively and also 1 out of every 10 online transactions is done in a rural area. This is quite a significant number, which shows that e-commerce and internet have really taken off in India."

When asked, how this field of e-commerce is evolving, he told us that the rate of growth is really fast, a lot of new players are talking about fast growth. "We ourselves have seen an increasing growth rate in past 12 months. A lot of things contribute to this like internet penetration is increasing, broadband penetration is increasing, and there are regulations which are making online payments much safer. Also infrastructure around e-commerce and logistic services are improving day by day", he said.

Kashyap says, "The largest trend being the fact that, those numbers of internet users are also increasing with their satisfaction and comfort ability, which is the over line driver of the way e-commerce is evolving. In the coming years the growth rate in the field of e-commerce will accelerate at a much faster speed."

The key strength of eBay is the wide range and variety of products it has. Speaking about the strategies in terms of growth and marketing, he said, "Two and a half million products are available on our site. We have a simple product like a mobile phone to the most unique items in terms of fashion. The primary offering of eBay to the market is its wide and varied range of products."

In terms of dealing with competition the portal provides ample and assorted range of products to the customers. "We make the entire process of online shopping very easy and simple as Indians need a little bit of encouragement in terms of online shopping and we are focusing on that," concluded Kashyap.

On any given day, there are millions of items listed on eBay across thousands of categories. People come to eBay to buy and sell all kinds of practical, unique, and interesting items, such as automobiles, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras, computers, furniture, sporting goods, tickets, and boats. | By Aanchal Kohli [aanchal(at)adgully.com]