Rajan Mehra, Country Manager, New Ventures & Payments, eBay India, chaired the session on “Business to Business”. He said that eBay India also transacts trucks and lorries, with the sellers including fleet owners and banks, pre-approved. The buyers are usually large buyers who want a simple process, competitive knowledge and single source for comparison. For the consumers, the key need is price maximisation when selling. For the sellers, the need is different – transparency, nationwide scaling of operations, efficient market pricing, and structured data to plan business strategies. Supply of used vehicles comes from banks and dealers. Buyers are mostly male, 63% have not had access to the internet prior to this. Majority used internet through cybercafes. 60% of the trades come from 93 rural locations.
Vishwas Patel, CEO of Avenues put forth the case for an Indian credit card, instead of relying on MasterCard and Visa, since their understanding/acceptance of Indian products like chyavanparash and churan is limited. Most bricks and mortar companies do not have the technical know-how to go online, and in absence of effective competition, there just isn’t enough value for the consumer. He also said that mobile transactions have to improve – people should not have to spend three-four SMS to complete each transaction. He also mentioned KYC norms, the possibility of unaccounted for money beig used in online transactions, particularly with reference to the Itz Cash Card.
Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO of IndiaMart InterMesh spoke about problems that they have faced - they found that suppliers often did not have emails and were looking for buyers - Indiamart often had to fax the emails to the suppliers. They’re also habitual of receiving detailed mails with a letterhead in a proper format, so a single line email from a buyer asking for a catalogue was often not trusted.