Much talked about IRCTC’s ecommerce foray has gone live. If you visit IRCTC website, you will see a banner asking you to visit IRCTC online shopping mall at shop.irctc.co.in.
If you were expecting something really good in store for you will be disappointed. IRCTC’s ecommerce foray is nothing but a near exact replica of Yebhi.com with whom they had partnered to create the online store.
With the kind of subscriber base IRCTC has, they could have easily taken advantage of the huge opportunity available, but rather it has been reduced to meek extension of Yebhi sites with IRCTC’s header on top of every page.
I have no issues with the site in itself – It has everything that a good e-commerce site needs including all major product categories, deal pages, proper filters to get to right product page etc.
The problem I have is such low level of effort that has been put into integration of sites. Here is an example – If a user has to pay for their purchases, the site is redirected to Yebhi’s payment page. See the screenshot below.
All the payment options that are available on Yebhi.com are available for IRCTC shop as well (including COD)
Another aspect is, there is absolutely no integration with either IRCTC’s or Yebhi’s user database. So, for a user like me who has account with both the platforms has to register yet again with the same information for same sites.
The only addition that Yebhi has done with IRCTC shop is that they have added a new table in the database that will store users who have registered on IRCTC site.
It is quite clear from the way this site has been implemented that IRCTC will get a fixed share of revenue from every transactions that happens on the site. Yebhi will do everything including payment collection and logistics.
Bottom-line is, IRCTC Shop is simply a Affiliate partner of Yebhi, nothing more than that!
What is your take in this?