IRCTC ventures into e-commerce, ties up with Yebhi.com

Indian Railways tourism and catering corporation has made an entry into the e-commerce world with a tie up with Shop Online Trading Pvt Ltd. (SOTPL) a franchisee of - Yebhi.com. With this IRCTC- marks its entry into wider non-ticketing e-commerce space.

In this partnership SOTPL & Yebhi.com will develop and manage e-commerce platform for IRCTC. They will be responsible for end-to-end customer experience including user interface design on the IRCTC Shopping page to final delivery of the product to the customer.

In turn, IRCTC will give yebhi.com access to its huge traffic on the website which is around 1.2 million hits every day. Yebhi would be putting up its products on the IRCTC website without their brand name and taking care of delivery and all logistics involved. IRCTC has banked on its forte-the huge traffic it generates

The business model is based on sharing revenues generated through shopping on IRCTC. Yebhi plans to tap into tier3 and tier 4 cities by getting access to IRCTC traffic which runs into pockets across the country.

Considering the risks involved in the e-commerce industry, IRCTC has made ‘a safe entry to the e-commerce non-ticketing sector’ added Rakesh Tandon, Chairman and Managing Director IRCTC.

Thriving on the already existing resources of IRCTC, the organization expects to learn and grow into this business. “We have a wonderful platform in place- 2 crore registered users, tie-up with most of the banks. Our vision is to use these parameters for new ventures. We are still learning about this industry. This is our learning curve," said Tandon.

For Yebhi, this association with IRCTC will get it a readymade supply chain with all products offering at one go powered by Yebhi.com and at the same time Yebhi.com is able to reach out real India that starts from tier 2 - tier 3 cities and goes deep into tier4 and 5 cities, says Manmohan Agarwal, CEO, Yebhi.com.

E-tailing in India will grow from the current $0.6 billion to $76 billion by 2021 by the estimates of Technopak.