Title - IRCTC forays into online shopping

NEW DELHI: IRCTC has entered the online shopping segment in partnership with retail company Yebhi.com. The latter will develop and manage the e-commerce platform for the Indian Railways subsidiary via its unit Shop Online Trading Pvt Ltd (SOTPL).

According to the contract, SOTPL will be deploying the entire online shopping platform for IRCTC within 60 days from the date of signing of the agreement. It will be responsible for end-to-end customer experience, from user interface to final delivery of the product to the customer.

This deal is based on a tender that IRCTC opened in February this year to shortlist a partner for its online shopping platform. The tender was open for established e-commerce companies with minimum annual turnover of Rs 40 crore from B2C e-commerce business in the last financial year. The applicants were also required to have a catalogue of over 500 brands and offer merchandize from minimum five product categories.

The IRCTC portal gets approximately 1.2 million daily visits and generates 180 million transactions annually. This is the highest among all e-commerce websites in the country.

"We are thrilled to partner with IRCTC, India's largest e-commerce website, and look forward to this mutually beneficial association. With this association IRCTC is getting a ready made 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 to real India that starts from tier 2 and tier 3 cities and goes deep into tier4 and 5 cities." says Manmohan Agarwal CEO Yebhi.com