Yebhi shuts its marketplace, shifts to product discovery platform

Unable to raise the required capital, Yebhi has been forced to close down its online marketplace platform and pivot to being a fashion discovery and redirection site. Yebhi’s new avatar will have the following features:

• List products from online fashion stores
  
• Help customers to select products
• Personalised recommendations

“Fashion etailing has evolved significantly in India and customers are seeking more information and engagement before purchasing a product. We are changing Yebhi to address these customers. We are bringing them variety from all the online and local stores, showing them prices with discounts & offers across these stores, and guiding them to products that would most suit their tastes, social circles and body structure,” says Danish Ahmed, CEO of Yebhi.

“Ecommerce is a very capital intensive industry and companies will continue to burn a lot of capital to acquire more customers. We decided to move out of that space and leverage our learning and brand value to build a business that is highly profitable and scalable. We are building a business which is capital efficient and at the same time consumer efficient in today’s scenario,” adds Danish.

Although Yebhi had secured more than $30 million from venture capitalists, it was not able to manage further funding or merger even. Nitin Aggarwal, one of Yebhi’s co-founders, had exited from the company earlier this year. So the shift in business model seems like a sensible move as the marketplace was in stealth mode for a long time anyway.

Yebhi’s user base of over 2 million consumers can be leveraged on to grow as a product discovery platform. Do you think this will work out better for Yebhi?