With the increased penetration of smartphones and apps in the Indian market, online shopping portal eBay is betting on mobile commerce in a big way. To cash in on the popularity of mobile-based transactions, it has deployed a slew of new applications.
?The portal would be witnessing uptick in m-commerce in India following its embedding of paisa pay mobile application on Android and Microsoft operating system-based smartphones,? said Rajesh Ramachandran, GM and head of India product centre, eBay India Development Centre.
?Paisa pay is eBay?s secure online payment gateway where buyers make credit card, debit card and bank transfer payments to sellers online. In couple of quarters from now, paisa pay in the form of downloadable mobile application will be available for embedding with Andriod and Microsoft OS-based smartphones to enable m-commerce transactions over eBay. We have set a tipping point of year 2012 for reaching a critical mass in m-commerce vertical through various brands of smartphones,? he said.
The around $1.8 billion global m-commerce market is poised to mop up substantial business and customers from Indian market following the proliferation of Android-based smartphones.
?We don?t have absolute numbers, but even low-end GPRS phone users have started accessing our portal for their online shopping needs when we had launched our mobile web some 3 months ago,? he said.
Other than m-commerce, the next sunrise segment for eBay India would be the cross-border trade between countries like India and China in the Asia Pacific region.