By Saumya Tewari

Yebhi has confimed its partnership with IRCTC as an ecommerce partner. Below is the statement that the company released today.

IRCTC, the subsidiary of the Indian Railways has partnered with Shop Online Trading Pvt Ltd. (SOTPL) a franchisee of India’s leading Online Lifestyle and Home portal - Yebhi.com, marking its entry into Online Shopping. IRCTC and Yebhi plan to do over Rs.200 Crores of business in the first year.

Through this strategic tie-up SOTPL and Yebhi.com will be responsible for developing and managing the e-commerce platform for IRCTC. It will be responsible for end-to-end customer experience from User Interface design on the IRCTC Shopping page to final delivery of the product to the customer.

“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 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 tier 4 and 5 cities,” said Manmohan Agarwal CEO Yebhi.com.

IRCTC gets close to 1.2 million daily visits generating 180 million transactions every year thus making it the largest Ecommerce site in the country. Yebhi.com gets close to 100 million visits per annum and does over 2 million transactions every year. With both Yebhi.Com and IRCTC jointly reaching out to such a huge number of customers will get many more new users to trial online shopping thus giving a huge boost to the fledgling Ecommerce Industry in India and help taking online shopping to Real India.

The partnership is based on a tender process that IRCTC opened in February this year to shortlist a partner for its online shopping platform. The tender was open for established Ecommerce companies with minimum annual turnover of INR 40 crore from B2C e-commerce business in the last financial year and having a catalog of over 500 brands and offer merchandise from minimum five product categories.

As per the contract SOTPL will be deploying the entire online shopping platform for IRCTC within 60 days from the date of signing of the agreement.

July 15th Report

IRCTC has selected Yebhi.com as its ecommerce partner if various sources are to be believed. India Digital Review spoke to Nikhil Rungta, Chief Business Officer, Yebhi who refused to comment on the same.

“I’m not in a position to comment on the development,” he said.

Earlier this year, IRCTC announced to enter in the ecommerce space stating that the move is aimed at monetizing its registered user base.

In February this year, IRCTC has opened a tender to select a white label solution provider for its online retail platform. IRCTC will outsource the back-end jobs for online retailing, while the front-end ones will be owned by the firm. It followed the same model while diversifying into hotel booking and flight ticket booking services.

According to sources, Yebhi will develop and manage ecommerce platform for IRCTC apart from managing the B2C supply chain for shipment , logistics, warehousing and delivery.

The tender released by IRCTC invited ecommerce and IT companies with minimum annual turnover of INR 40 crore from B2C e-commerce business in the last financial year. It also asked the company to have provided white label solution involving commercial transactions to at least three white label partners in the current financial year and the last two financial years (2010-11 and 2011-12).

IRCTC is looking to venture in books, footwear, mobile phones, furnishings and electronics space.