Now not only you can book train tickets from Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) you can shop for electronic items, clothing & accessories and home decor. IRCTC has partnered with one of India’s top e-commerce provider Yebhi.com to open up the IRCTC online shopping (shop.irctc.com) store.
Earlier IRCTC has published a tender for the Rs 1000 crore E-commerce project where the winning company is responsible for building and maintaining the E-commerce platform. Major Indian e-commerce players like Infibeam, Yebhi and others have bid on this and finally Yebhi go hold on the tender. IRCTC online shopping site is one of the big deal ever happened in Indian e-commerce space as they hold nearly 20 million active users in its database which is simply the double of India’s biggest online retailer Flipkart.
But if you are excepting something revolutionary on the e-commerce space, then you will be disappointed, as the IRCTC online shop is just a replica of the Yebhi.com online store with change in the logo and wording around. The store currently doesn’t take advantage of the massive user base of IRCTC, instead users need to re-register with the shopping site for purchase. It also doesn’t use the payment gateway of IRCTC instead you will be re-directed to the Yebhi payment gateway.
It seems IRCTC is just taking advantage of its massive Indian traffic and acting as a affiliate player of Yebhi which provides a fixed share of revenue out of every transactions that happens on the store.
And what Indians think about it? –
I know why IRCTC is selling shirts online. It is for you to tear them when you can’t buy tickets. #StressBuster
— Sachin Kalbag (@SachinKalbag) August 29, 2013
Here is how IRCTC Online Shop Should Have Priced Their Products [Trak.in Toons] http://t.co/KNMECVuTbC #IRCTC pic.twitter.com/slE3UqkwdQ
— Arun Prabhudesai (@8ap) August 30, 2013
@Irctc Oh boy! you can expand your horizons when you are flawless in one market! #ecommerce #india
— Raghu Gonnabathula (@RaghuVamz) August 30, 2013
Irctc comes up with a e-commerce shopping site :/ … Seriously … #WhatAJoke
— Pratik (@AmHatke) August 30, 2013