eBay India expects 50-60% growth this year

Ecommerce firm eBay expects its Indian business to grow 50-60 percent in the next 12 months as users become more comfortable with making purchases online.

Kashyap Vadapalli, director (categories & business development), eBay India, told reporters here that the online commerce space in India was booming with tremendous growth in the number of consumers and sellers moving online.

The Indian ecommerce market in 2010 was worth Rs 30,000-32,000 crore, of which travel and holiday bookings accounted for 80-90 percent and the rest came from products and services (numbering around 2,500-3,000). He said the market was expanding four times every three years.

While 15 million shopped online last year, those buying products were only 2-3 million, he said. Within the products category, mobile phones and accessories and memory devices were seeing big business, the last product being bigger online than in the physical market. He expected the number of products sold online to double in the next 12-18 months to 6 million.

eBay has a market-leading 45 percent share in the Indian ecommerce space, he said. It has 13,000 merchants selling on its platform, and expects this number to grow 50 percent this year. It has 1 million live listings on its site now, and would double this number in a year.

It gets 3 million visitors a month, and 80 percent of its sales are from fixed-price products while the rest are from auctions. Each buyer on its site makes 3-4 repeat purchases in a year, he said.

The company is in a heavy acquisition mode now and sees effective targeting and getting repeat purchases as important. Its mobile platform launched recently specialises in offering comparative prices in a convenient way, and hopes to see growth in mobile segment as 3G penetration picks up.