ebay X.Commerce & If Indian eCommerce has Missed the Bus?

ebay is gradually but steadily& seriously working towards becoming the dominant ecommerce player if the world. After having been beaten by Taobao in China and observing the surge of Amazon as a cloud-marketplace, it’s not unnatural for ebay to initiate what it calls X.Commerce.

ebay realises that to win this battle, it has to play the end-to-end game; meaning ebay wants to control, payments, logistics & supply chain, multichannel customer experience & transaction,
enabling hosted shopfronts, and providing scale & targetd reach to SMBs, large enterprises or C2C merchants

I tried creating an infographic to show the ebay strategy based on my understanding and you can understand how the recent buy-outs by ebay are starting to make sense.

Let’s look at the buy outs first:

1. Where.com – Over 1.2 lac retailers onboard. Location based ad-network + local deals. (USD135M)

2. Milo.com-local ecommerce player (USD 75M)

3. Magento.com- Open sourced ecom platform-alongwith mcommerce and hosted shopfront options. Over 90,000 retailers onboard. (ebay bought 49% stake last year @ USD22.5M, the rest 51% was bought this year)

4. GSI- Complete logistics, order management and CRM platform. ((USD 1.96B)

5. PayPal: mobile and web payments (USD1.5B)

6. FigCard- Point of purchase payments (figures not available)

7. Red Laser- barcode reading app (bought in 2010)

At the centre of the ebay nervous system is the Open Sourced Web & Mobile Platform- Magento-this platform can enable anyone to start a shop, and enables customers to transact
from a web or mobile platform. This platform also enables developers to develop applications and solutions which can be bought by both buyers and sellers

On this platform ebay plugged in PayPal for payment integration, and GSI for logistics, supply chain, and customer care.

This kind of closes the loop for everyone.

The services range from free to a few thousand dollars a year for merchants.

But the story is not over yet, ebay understands the merit of local shopping, local search, and offline payments. If these could be
brought in the ebay ecosystem then ebay will indeed control the real end-to-end of shopping.

And that’s how Milo, Figo and Red Laser make sense.
Milo is a local ecommerce platform- that allows users to search and buy products within a specific geography. This will also be integrated with the Open Source Platform.

Red Laser- allows users with smartphone to do comparison shopping offline, and then buy online near their location (courstey Milo), through barcode readers. (ebay had sold USD 600M of products through mobile phones in 2009, and tosay 10% of all ebay sales are on Mobile phones in UK)

See how Red Laser works here

‘Where’ allows users to search intersting deals locally, and also allows advertisers and merchants to target users by geography.

Figcard is another interesting acquisition, given that it enables offline transactions via mobile. Watch this very interesting video on how Fig Card works here:

An interesting read on Mobile Payments is also here

The question, after having read the above, is Are Indian eCommerce companies thinking on these lines yet? And more importantly- have Indian eCommerce players missed the bus already?

xcommerce bus image courstey: https://plus.google.com/108257742736725504517/posts

Tags: ebay, ecommerce, india, xcommerce