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As you briefly hinted - this primarily because of shipping logistics. Flipkart and Amazon are successful because of solving for that.

For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.

Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.

Even if we ignore the high shipping charges for relatively low value products, scammers, fraudulent sellers, the returns if receiver not available etc.

> For eBay kind of model where the seller has to pack and ship items themselves, it would be a nightmare. The govt postal service is highly inefficient and the private players are not organized for door to door logistics.

Amazon doesn't package and ship your items if it weighs over 30kg, you've to fulfill orders on your own if it's larger than 30kg.

>Try shipping few metal parts weighing 1Kg+ yourself to any random address to understand perhaps that is the most difficult part of the problem.

Not true! India has changed. I've shipped over 300kg per shipment no problem. I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg

I am not sure how old was your experience, leave the government services. We ship with delhivery and safe express

Who are you shipping with? And when did you try? Today you can easily get the shipping rates we are getting by signing up for Delhivery's business account the more you ship the cheaper it becomes but man we are no longer living in dark ages of IndiaPost parcel times anymore

> I've a business of shipping industrial parts and we regularly ship median weight of 50kg

There's the crux. Ebay is not about regular e-commerce retailer, but it is about avg next door Joe selling surplus items that they have. That's the scenario you painted.

These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.

I have friends who have their own e-commerce shopify storefronts, and you are absolutely right they have a hassel free shipping experience (more or less), but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.

>These avg Joe will not have 'Delhivery accounts' to ship. EBay is for infrequent non traditional online sellers.

Did you ever try? A lot of web shops are being run in India by average Joe now, sometimes take a look at Google shopping tab.

Signing up for delivery business account is not smth you need much for, anyone can sign-up and start today.

Okay so you don't want to sign up for Delhivery account, sign up for ShipRocket (it's just an account sign-up like any website). Upload your shipment dimension and they'll arrange pickup and deliver your goods.

>but I know that they in their dreams will not use eBay if it was there in India.

They'll depending on what they are selling if they are selling consumer goods, they can sign up with Amazon but if they are selling smth more niche, they'll benefit greatly from product discovery that comes with a website like eBay, unless they've a recognizable brand and enough money to spend on advertisement and marketing a guy with an eBay account can get a lot of sales.

Honestly most guys will will not be shipping 50kg item from get go. To ship small 1 or 2 kg item they can approach nearest courier service and if they've a few of these Packets, courier offers pickup from your premise.

For small packets, price variation among different courier providers isn't much to fuss about. Only at higher weight levels, the delhivery/safe express standout from the competition.

So here's the process:

1. Sign up for ShipRocket

2. Pack your goods and wait for it to be picked up and delivered

How can we make it easier than this? Next step is only that a courier company reads your mind and picksup unpacked goods, pack it and deliver it to customers using teleportation. There isn't room for making it easier than this, just saying.

A person who can't be bothered to do is, has any place in business? What he deserves to make money for if he can't given do this.

I am a guy from a small city near Delhi with not much resources and I still manage to ship goods and make good money that I left my job, if I can do it, anyone can.

Thanks for this detailed reply. Much appreciated because I learned a thing or two.

> Did you ever try?

No, not Delhivery kind of specialised courier. But in USA I was eBay user. I was an ordinary bloke with 9-5 job, and used to sell excess stuff (old gadget which I want to upgrade from), shipping charges were major part of the transaction and my endeavour was to minimize it - ended up using US postal service quite a few times.

>Delhivery kind of specialised courier.

Here I am talking about the domestic courier service not shipping to US for international shipping I agree we are still behind.

I also have export import business where I sell Chinese goods into US and India.

Many times in small towns Amazon routes its fullfiled by Amazon shipments to Delhivery.

Hardly any ecomerce service is using India Post now, most small packets are through XpressBees and Delhivery. Rest are through Amazon and Flipkarts own logistics like ATS and Ekart respectively

> For example, I live a town with population of 500K (200km away from Delhi) and while repairing my car, the mechanic told me he will go to Delhi and try getting the spare part from Junkyard owners.

> Maybe guys from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore don't have this problem but majority of Indian population still lives in small towns and villages where finding 1 used part at affordable price can save a business or medical equipment (life). What are the technical people in small towns are supposed to do? Run to Delhi and Mumbai each time you need a spare part?

> Such a waste of human efforts, my mechanic could have instead bought it on eBay from a junkyard owner who is also a seller on ebay through courier if eBay like website existed.

Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.

>Ebay doesn't handle this well in the US either. I would love to use ebay as a junkyard metasearch engine.

But you can find people who scavenge junkyards and are listed as sellers on eBay who do sell used bench grinder (maybe after restoring them!?), Induction motors, industrial brushless motors etc... In India even that is also not easy to find.

I am still puzzled at Amazon's decision to quit China, they did so well exactly in those small town markets, where Taobao, and Jingdong did not venture.

Their service with mostly wholly owned logistic was considered superior.

Yeaa Amazon here is best in small towns of India. In my town they've bought a warehouse at Industrial area and their trucks arrive before 7am.

I place order before 2pm and my orders arrive at my desk next day before 11am, arrives in my town at 7am.

What's stopping someone from building ebay for India? Why hasn't ebay done that?

We can say startups didn't bother with it because eBay India was already operating in market before startup culture was even here in India.

Back in time eBay was operating in Indian market and eBay was successful as the payment service used on eBay was PayPal, buyers had protection in India which they couldn't get with any other local website as online payment infrastructure was in dark ages in India at that time.

After that India rapidly grew in e-commerce and payment platforms rapidly developed (now they are at par with western ones or we can say even better and payment regulations also improved a lot). Now logistics has also improved a lot, so we can receive goods in just 1 or 2 days in any part of the country. We've new expressways, freight corridors, capacity expanding rapidly so now even more businesses is possible in India yet we are leaving the obvious one out. Where are all my Indian executives, investors, guys from IITs are doing? Why they aren't working on this?

Then Flipkart buys eBay India and shuts it down.

And now there exists market vaccum. Everyone is looking at each other, no startup founder doing anything about it. Existence of eBay alternative will add great efficiency to India market, reduce its CO2 footprint as well when used products find buyer instead of destroying and remelting them.

What is Flipkart and why would it shut eBay India down if it's (as it certainly sounds and I would expect) such a massive, ripe, profitable market?

Flipkart is an Indian e-commerce VC funded giant like Amazon, it's nearly same just that it operates only in india.

Flipkart has a history of buying and shutting down businesses.

flipkart is actually walmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipkart ( Owner Walmart (77%), )

Also one key thing is that Flipkart only saw eBay as a threat that could be bought by competition and eBay was a known brand and nearly every online person in India knew about it.

Just to remove this possibility of being used as a weapon in competition's hand, they killed it.

They certainly didn't understand the whole use case of eBay like website but killed it because it was possible to use it for competition in consumer goods space considering it had many things that were being sold on Flipkart too

so why is nobody starting a new one?

Thats indeed interesting. Do you know why this is the case?

Yes, I think it's simply because those who have ability to make it happen have never needed anything to buy used (considering all startups founders in India are from software field and rich enough to buy everything new or they live in a big city where they don't have this problem, they can drive to near junkyard or market and find nearly everything)

Okay I am only guessing, the historic reason is listed in another subcomment on my original post.