Baazee to become eBay India

Baazee, India's most celebrated auctions site, would soon be rechristened as eBay India. This move is being undertaken to integrate eBay's global best practices, features and tools in the site and make it more user friendly. eBay had acquired Baazee.com and its subsidiary Baazee.com India Pvt Ltd for $50 million in August last year. Baazee.com has already started transferring user information to eBay's global technology hosting centers. This is part of a process planned as early as the eBay acquisition in August 2004 and the changes have been communicated to the Baazee users starting November 2004. Baazee is also planning to work closely with the IT industry and the IT ministry to explore the potential of Internet in enabling e-commerce and entrepreneurship in India. It also plan to reach out to all of India's Internet population over the next year through Baazee Academies, online advertising and PR to make them aware of Baazee's offering and get them to trade on the site.