It seems like eBay is bringing onboard popular offline brands and retailers and becoming a facilitator for their online sales, according to a report from The Economic Times. The company has signed up offline merchants like Fabindia, Bata, Catwalk and Hidesign in the last few weeks to improve its lifestyle offering and hopes to triple its sales figures in this lifestyle space. According to the report, eBay India's Country Manager, B Muralikrishnan stated that setting up fulfillment centres and holding inventory impacts the company's gross margins negatively and thereby prevents fast scaling. Hence, unlike other e-commerce partners they prefer partnering with allied service providers and courier service providers to manage out their business. So how are these brands managing online sales? - On change in strategy to bring in offline brands: In a brief conversation with MediaNama, Abhimanyu Lal, Head Category Management – eBay India, denied any changes to the company's existing strategy. eBay had primarily started as a person to person collectible trading marketplace, however as e-commerce became more mainstream in India, bigger brands and retailers partnered with eBay to sell their products on the latter's portal, so as to create an additional revenue channel. So apparently, it looks like the offline brands looked at it as an opportunity, and joined eBay which benefitted from the expansion in its lifestyle product offering, without worrying about warehousing. When asked if there has been a sudden focus to beef up their lifestyle offerings, Abhimanyu said that they have historically been very strong in this segment but as the…
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