'India a priority market for eBay'

In an interview, Vidmay Naini, eBay’s general manager for global emerging markets, which include India and Southeast Asia, spoke about the challenges faced by India’s e-commerce exporters and the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce ventures

- Shouvik Das

Bay, an online marketplace for buyers and sellers, generates 50% of its revenue from markets outside the US. India, which is classified under emerging markets, has remained an important market for eBay despite the company exiting the market in 2017. In an interview, Vidmay Naini, eBay's general manager for global emerging markets, which include India and Southeast Asia, spoke about the challenges faced by India's e-commerce exporters and the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce ventures. Edited excerpts:

How significant is the Indian market to eBay?

Often, there is a lot of baggage to the eBay narrative. We do not operate in the domestic market at this point in time—in 2017, we exited the domestic market in India and sold our India business to Flipkart. So, starting in 2018, one of our consistent strategies has been to focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) exports.

This essentially entails Indian sellers selling (products) to the world. We’ve been enabling this for more than a decade, where we’ve enabled Indian sellers to sell to our co-sites in the US, the UK, Germany and mainland Europe.

This has been our focus in India since 2018, and we’ve had a robust, scalable and strong business emerging out of here. India is one of our priority markets and is definitely among the top five of 180 countries under eBay’s emerging markets division.

Is India supportive of export-driven e-commerce operations?