Domestic / inland postal rates

Rates for Speed Post, Speed Post(International), Express Parcel, Corporate Money Order, Gift Service – Premium services calculator

Tariff for sending mail/ parcels to foreign countries / international postal rates for India

The rates are usually revised during the annual budget.

http://portal.bsnl.in/bsnlcca/login.aspx

A 17 digit tracking number is generated.

You also register for

• BSNL Broadband connection
• BSNL 3G

http://www.bsnl.co.in/stdsearch.php

You can either enter the city name or city code.

List of all STD codes (state wise)

http://www.bsnl.co.in/viewstatecode.php

http://www.paypal-apac.com/India/

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/in/201007.shtml#2010-07-28112238

Paypal account holders will only be able to withdraw funds by check from July 29, 2010. At times, the postal system is unreliable, so it would be better if they offered some form of secure delivery on payment of an additional fee.

Update : On 30 July 2010,  Paypal announced that electronic withdrawals could continue.  However, some users are reporting that Mass payment has been disabled.

Guidelines on how to file a consumer complaint.

http://cgsiindia.org

http://business.gov.in/consumer_rights/consumer_complaints.php

This article on email interception and phone tapping in India  explains how it is done.

It appears that many times this facility is misused to harass people or get information on business rivals.  A month ago , emails sent to 2 of my email addresses disappeared.  I contacted the ISP , who gave me complaint numbers , but  are unable to give a logical explanation for the same even after a month.

I hope there will be  greater transparency in the system in future.

Not all Indian Paypal account holders have received this mail . Initially many thought it was a phishing email, but later Paypal has confirmed that the email is genuine. Also Gmail seems to have flagged the email as spam.  They have also not specified a date from which these rules / restrictions will come into effect.

The biggest restriction is:
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.

The main disadvantage of this rule is that a Paypal account holder will lose money in transaction fees – when you withdraw to your Indian bank account in Indian Rupees, you lose 2.5-3% in currency conversion fees and when you again pay through credit card, the credit card company will charge up to 5% as currency conversion fees for converting the Indian Rupees back to US Dollars. Also many people in India avoid getting a credit card, since many Indian credit card issuers are notorious for their poor service, inaccurate billing and hiring the services of questionable collection agents. 

Paypal checks are sent by ordinary post and take up to month to delivered. The status of bank withdrawals of many Indian account holders on or after 7 April 2010 is shown as pending. Of all the online payment processors, Paypal seems to most regulated in India because it has the largest number of users in India and uses NEFT.

Update 14 April, 2010  : There seems to be a problem with Paypal withdrawals to bank accounts in India on 7 , 8, 9 April, 2010  and their status is still shown as pending.  Withdrawals on 10 April 2010 have been credited to the bank account . Some users have requested cancellation of the pending withdrawal, but they may incur a foreign currency losss and it is not clear whether the  forex loss will be credited back to the account

One lakh seventy thousand Indians regularly receive or send money abroad, through the online banking website PayPal. Actually, about 1.6 million Indians are signed up for the service, though not all of them are regular users. That’s according to Anuj Nayar, Director of Global Communications, at PayPal.com.

There are many blogs that claim to cover India’s online industry , but this is one major segment that they conveniently ignore. Facebook and Twitter are the latest fad (slowly replacing Orkut and Myspace), but if they are down, people’s lives are not affected. Nowadays, in many companies in India, the amount of time you spend in office is an indicator of how “hard working” you are, and when there is no real work , employees spend time on these social networking websites, boosting their traffic.

Websites backed by big media houses have the resources to send out Press Releases and get media coverage, but rarely spend any time understanding the customer needs. Most of these companies and their employees have a very patronizing attitude if you are not well known, but in fact their audience is usually limited to India and NRIs, while many online publishers work with advertisers through out the world.

Also motivation levels differ. An employee with a big media firm will just be doing a job, compiling information from various famous websites, at the end of the day they will get their salary. On the other hand, if you own an online business, you are always experimenting with new things, you have to understand the market, find reliable business partners. There is no replacement for practical experience online.  The big companies can hire hackers to sabotage your business, hoping you will sell your websites. But no one can take away what you have learnt, and you can always start again from scratch.

Your ability to make money online over the long term depends on a number of factors like:

• How you manage your overheads – if you keep them sufficiently low, it is much easier to survive.

• Your family responsibilities and finances – if you have a lot of loans, a dependent wife and children, it can be difficult to survive during the downturn.

• Level of technical competence and ability to learn – if you can do the server admin, content writing and manage advertising yourself it helps

• Diversification – revenue from multiple sources ensures that there are fewer variations in income.

• Ability to take risks – If your business is doing well, it is easy to become complacent, but if you do not take risks and fail, it can adversely affect your future business.

• Choice of business partners – it is important to work with reliable companies who provide good customer support.

• Compared to Western countries making money online is a lot more difficult, you cannot sign up for many advertising networks (since you are from India), affiliate commissions are routinely stolen  due to cookie stuffing, so you have to spend a lot of time in front of the computer experimenting to find out what works. Some people may get bored or lack the discipline to do so.

• Lifestyle – If you lead a lavish lifestyle, parties,expensive luxury products, foreign holidays, you have less to see you through difficult times, so a job is better for you.

This article  http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/business-capital-stuck-in-paypal-accounts/386902/

mentions the problems faced by small business account holders in India, but underestimates the number of people affected. It is not 30,000-40000, it is more likely to be 400,000( my estimate is that it should be more). I have an old work at home website, about making money online, and the yearly traffic is much more than 30,000 – 40,000. If you make any significant amount of money online, and have diversified income sources, Paypal is the most popular payment option for online payments.

This issue has adversely affected many businesses, especially service providers who have to pay their employees and freelancers who have loans and families to support. It is nearly a month now, mass payments sent to even Indian business accounts between Feb 1-3 were reversed, and some senders are not returning the money. Both Paypal and RBI could have handled the issue better and at least indicated a time frame for resolution, so that users can plan for the future.

The mainstream media can give extensive coverage to film stars and cricketers, who are basically entertainers , but is totally isolated from issues which really affect  people online. This could be the reason why despite all the investments they make, there is little growth in their internet business. Though Twitter, Facebook and social networking websites get a lot of media coverage, they are basically time pass activities. In India, people are looking for value for money, if I can make money online, I do not mind spending money online, but I definitely do not care for fake “friends”online.