Why are Indian bitcoin prices higher than international prices? = Zebpay

As you might have noticed, Indian bitcoin prices are higher than international prices. I would like to clear out a few misconceptions.
There is no single international price. Prices vary significantly between exchanges in different countries. As you will see from below screenshot taken at 11:30am today, prices range from $2,232 (~ Rs 1,43,500) to $2,546 (~ Rs 1,63,600). That’s a difference of Rs 20,000. And we have seen higher differences also. And this is just a sample. Exchanges in many countries are not listed here.

Zebpay prices are not higher because we are fleecing our users. The price on Zebpay as on 11:30am is Rs 1,88,000 to buy bitcoins and Rs 179,800 to sell. The sell price is also Rs 16,200 higher than the highest price on an exchange above. And it is a whopping Rs 36,300 higher than the lowest price. However, we still don’t have sellers in India willing to sell at this price. So we have two options. We keep increasing the sell price till we have sellers. And we keep the buy prices very high to discourage buyers. If we don’t do this, we will have no stock left to sell.

ther thing you will notice is that difference between our buy and sell prices increases when prices are volatile. We have to do this as explained above to manage buy and sell demand. When prices are relatively stable, we can manage our stocks better and we reduce the spread.
Zebpay goal is to provide our users with bitcoins at prices which are close to international prices. And you can help us do that by selling bitcoins and not buying bitcoins when Indian prices are higher and putting a downward pressure on the price :).