IRCTC’s Online Shop Could Be An Advantage For Online Sellers

Last week, we heard the news that the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) had launched its own e-commerce website. The website has been built for IRCTC by the fashion e-commerce marketplace, Yebhi. The company which was awarded a Rs.1000 crore contract will be building and managing the e-commerce platform on behalf of the IRCTC.

As you very well know, the amount of traffic coming onto IRCTC’s website is immense, resulting in their servers being overloaded almost every other day. The railway booking website sees almost a million visits every day and around 4 lakh tickets are booked on a daily basis. The Corporation has promised that they will be upgrading their technology during the coming year so that it can better handle this kind of traffic.

Now, the interesting part is how IRCTC is leveraging this traffic in order to let them shop for other goods on its website. Finally, it seems the corporation has become business savvy by adding additional revenue streams by trying to monetize the people coming onto their website for booking tickets.

What’s in it for sellers?

The IRCTC shop currently offers Apparel for Men, Women and Kids in addition to mobiles, electronics and home appliances and furnishing. Since the store is managed by Yebhi which is a specialized apparel marketplace, it would be wise for sellers to put their goods up on this platform and take advantage of the traffic that IRCTC gets. The footfall on IRCTC far outweighs many other marketplaces, and so by association, sellers on the IRCTC sponsored marketplace should definitely start getting more exposure in addition to new business.

It remains to be seen whether IRCTC customers are engaged enough to also buy unrelated goods, though it would be unfortunate to miss out on such an opportunity. It is perhaps a world’s first to see a railway corporation also selling apparel, so congratulations to the IRCTC!