"I had bid for and won a scanner at the reserve price but I was told that I was not eligible for it," says a customer who bid on auction site Bid or Buy. "I had been billed twice over for my Vasool card," says one irate customer who bought an eligibility card which would enable him to avail of bargains on the B2C auction site Vasool.com. He was made to pay cash on delivery of the card after which he was charged on his credit card as well. The company subsequently refunded the amount but the customer is wary of making online payments henceforth.

"I didn't see any value in registering on the site since most categories drew a blank" says a user who visited Baazee.com. Well, not everyonetests the waters before they go through the all important `name, address, phone, number' routine during the mandatory registration process. This reporter for instance, spent 30 minutes on Baazee.com and accomplished nothing other than parting with personal details for the all important registration which presumably adds one more statistic to the site's database.

None of the listed categories I visited had a single item on auction. The company feels there may have been a compatibility issue with the browser I was using but factor in the speed of Internet connectivity and what you have is what I got - a half-hour spent fruitlessly, followed up with a an e-mail from the company welcoming me aboard.

Take the case of one Internet enthusiast, who bid for and won a casette and a CD on Bid or Buy, "I received a message asking me to get in touch with a seller via e-mail but I received no response from him.'' "We have put in place measures to verify intent on both sides but despite this if deals fall through, wewill try and address it if it is brought to our notice," says Amit Bhartiya, consultant, Bid or Buy India.

What these experiences raise are a bunch of very pertinent questions about the much touted auction sites that have just arisen on the Indian cyberskyline.

Are they providing the all important return on time spent which is critical for any Internet venture to succeed? Are their backend systems capable of providing error-free service? Is the intent of the seller/buyer being verified? Can the auctioneer (read site) afford to delink itself from the delivery process and assume that the transaction can be completed satisfactorily between buyer and seller? And, what happens to the good old touch and feel factor which is a critical pre-purchase stage that applies to most products? As one antique buyer puts it,"I saw an attractive antique chair on one of the sites but I couldn't imagine bidding for something I couldn't see."

"Yes the touch-and-feel factor is proving to be important especially in countrieslike India so we're in the process of setting up Baazee Exchange Centres where buyer and seller can actually meet," says Nainu Kumar, manager, corporate communications, Baazee.com.

Kumar also says that Internationally the experience with auction sites has been one where 4 out of 5 transactions actually fall through because either buyer or seller opt out. "What we are doing on Baazee however is assigning ratings to buyers and sellers which is public so anyone who wants to enter into a transaction has the rating of the partner available to him to enable him to decide whether he wants to transact with that particular entity," he adds.

Bhartiya of Bid or Buy says that the engine which concludes a deal is completed automated whereby the seller is obliged to sell to the buyer the moment the bid is anything above the reserve price and the buyer is ineligible the moment the bid is a rupee below the reserve price so the claim that the customer could not avail of the scanner though he bid and won at the reserveprice (which makes him eligible to buy the product) is one which needs to be investigated.

Another underlying issue for sites like Vasool (a B2C auction model) is one of the online payment processing mechanism. "We in India don't have an efficient online real time payment processing mechanism yet as result of which the payment systems are not fault resistent," says Manish Godkhindi of Vasool.com. The site has tied up with ICICI Bank to avail of a payment gateway and expects the systems to be functional within a fortnight after which Godkhindi feels the margin of error could be well reduced.

For every disgruntled user (of an auction site) however, there are others who have successfully transacted on these sites. This coupled with runaway successes like ebay.com in the US establish the case for these sites but it might be some time before the homegrown online auctioneers build in features which factor in the ground realities in this part of the world.