India’s Economic Times cites three sources claiming the eBay are in discussions with ShopClues, an online shopping site in India.
ShopClues original vision was for a budget-friendly online bazaar in India. In 2012 ShopClues was reinvisaged as India’s First & Largest Fully Managed Marketplace and today has over 350,000 merchants selling on the platform. You can still see signs of it’s intention of bringing India’s Flea Markets online in the form of its two weekly events – the Sunday Flea Market, and the Wednesday Super Saver Bazaar.
Catering for all tastes, ShopCLues carry over 8.5 million products and you can get just about everything that you can imagine at ShopClues. From the usual products in Electronics, Fashion, Home & Kitchen, to highly unusual products like cow dung cakes.
Whilst eBay has been linked to ShopClues, including talk of a possible acquisition, running a domestic marketplace isn’t eBay’s stated intention. Their aim is to facilitate cross border sales for Indian merchants selling globally to the rest of the world.
“We plan to relaunch eBay India with a differentiated offer to focus initially on the cross-border trade opportunity, which we believe is significant. We believe there is huge growth potential for ecommerce in India and significant opportunity for multiple players to succeed in India’s diverse, domestic market.”
– eBay Inc
ShopClues could just be being hopeful that they’ll be acquired by eBay – they’ve been touting themselves for sale in recent months with Rakuten denying interest saying that ShopClues were “meeting literally everybody”. Whatever happens in India with eBay, from the 14th of August when sales on Flipkart’s version of eBay India ends there is going to be a gap in the market. Currently there’s no one to take up the slack – Flipkart and Amazon are both focused on domestic sales for new products, so the 2nd hand market and cross border market are up for grabs for whichever marketplace is quickest to get a platform in place.
