eBay Inc plans to open a Global Development Center in Bangalore and intends to hire up to 1000 technologists over the next three years. The company stated that this new Bangalore facility will focus on eBay marketplace and Paypal and will house technologists from both the companies.
eBay Inc added that the development centre will help build eBay’s existing presence in India which already includes a global development centre in Chennai that employs 2200 people and the eBay India business unit in Mumbai. The company has over 50 offices across the world. eBay also informed that it is hiring senior technologists with strong product development experience across many functions including research, platform and application development, architecture, quality engineering, product management, marketing and product analytics, user experience and design, and information security.
eBay In India
In March 2012, eBay India had tied up with popular offline brands and retailers to bring them onboard and become a facilitator for their online sales. The company had hoped to triple its sales figures in the lifestyle space and had signed up offline merchants like Fabindia, Bata, Catwalk and Hidesign for this purpose. It had then claimed that it currently has four million monthly unique visitors and sells six products every minute, although it had refused to share the exact transaction numbers.
A fortnight later, Paypal which currently has a crippled presence in India, had stated that it intended to apply for a domestic payment license in India and was planning to open an office in India next year. That being said, it is not yet clear if PayPal will tie-up with Banks to launch a money transfer service, competing with NPCI’s mobile money transfer platform IMPS which currently covers all the major Indian banks and similar products from companies like ZaakPay, PayMate, Beam and mChek or launch a consumer product in form of a semi-closed wallet to compete with services like Airtel Money, Itz Cash, Done Card, Oxigen and Beam.
