The post-lunch session was on ‘Converting Offline to Online’, and starting things off, Rajeev Gaur, VP & COO, Times Business Solutions spoke about the strength of the product being critical to creating customers. Though people now often spend more than they earn, they still don’t have confidence in giving their credit card numbers. The law still backs the customer, and does not support the merchant, who also needs some security against fraud. When Times did ads2book – they created an agent booking system to assist their customers - the B2C was online, and the B2B was offline. Now, almost Rs.6 crore of business is transacted every month there and they have 510 agents using their services nationally.
Cory York, Managing Director, Novator India spoke about his company which is an e-commerce solutions provider and the lessons they’ve learnt.  Among the challenges they faced while setting up operations in India was that it took them six to seven months to find a project manager - finding talent is an issue. He spoke about difficulties that businesses face when trying to go add e-commerce solutions, and often repeated the importance of having the right e-commerce solutions partner with sufficient experience to help save time and money. He gave the example of how Novator helped Interflora improve its business…a plug.
Gautam Thakar, Country Manager for Ebay India began with a few B2C models: Amazon began without any offline business, but leveraged a great distribution model. Walmart too can use its distribution network, while Dell is a case study of a manufacturer going directly to the customer. Comparison shopping engines search out the best deal for consumers. An online marketplace is a level playing field with low barriers to entry. In India, one third of the business at eBay comes from selling to markets outside India. For small sellers, they don’t have the marketing muscle to reach out to customers.
Vishal Anand, Founder and CEO of Mahamaza.com said that logistics is the last mile of connectivity for e-commerce. Taxation remains an issue since one state had VAT, while the other doesn’t. Financial companies have to come up with a payment mechanism since plastic isn’t prevalent in small towns. Speaking on how Mahamaza works he said that Amazon has a very successful referral system, but because of the limited population of Indians online, they had to customize it for India - they allowed people to sell products via customized websites. They have around 32 brands, 8 lakhs referral partners.

An interesting issue was brought up during the Q&A: of evaluation of sellers and situations of fraud on eBay: Gautam Thakar responded that they have seek the right balance between introduction of friction and doing nothing - they ask for verification details from sellers that allows them to be tracked. The person has to send them a fixed landline number, and eBay calls and checks. On tracking banned goods - eBay can’t do anything. If the buyer and seller both know that a particular product is contraband, and use the marketplace for transaction - unless someone complains, eBay can’t really do anything.

Seems to me to be a case for KYC (Know Your Customer) norms for e-Businesses as well.