Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has partnered with Shop Online Trading (SOTPL), a franchisee of e-commerce firm Yebhi.com, to mark its entry into the online shopping business.
Through this tie-up, SOTPL and Yebhi.com will be responsible for developing and managing the e-commerce platform for IRCTC, right from user interface design on the IRCTC shopping page to final delivery of the product.
Earlier, IRCTC had said that to enter the online retail space it would follow the white-label model, which basically means that the back-end jobs will be outsourced, while the front-end ones would be owned by IRCTC. This is the same model that it followed when it diversified into hotel booking and flight ticket booking.
In a statement, Manmohan Agarwal, CEO,Yebhi.com, said, “With this association, IRCTC is getting a readymade supply chain with all products at one go.”
The IRCTC portal gets close to 1.2 million daily visits, generating 180 million transactions annually. Yebhi.com, on the other hand, gets about 100 million visits a year and does over 2 million transactions a year.
The partnership is based on a tender process that IRCTC opened in February this year to shortlist. The tender was open for e-commerce companies with minimum annual turnover of Rs 40 crore from B2C e-commerce business in the last financial year, with a catalogue of over 500 brands and merchandise from minimum five product categories.
According to the contract, SOTPL will deploy the entire online shopping platform for IRCTC within 60 days of signing the agreement. The company said IRCTC and Yebhi planned to do over Rs 200 crore of business in the first year.