Notwithstanding the recent CCI anti-trust probe filed against them, IRCTC has created a record of sorts. They witnessed highest ever single day booking on March 19, when they booked 5.8 lakh tickets. Th previous highest was for 5.72 lakh e-tickets which were booked on Sept 2 last year.
Earlier this year, IRCTC launched a lite version of the website, where during the 2 hours of Tatkal booking (from 10:00am to 12:00pm), the website will be sans any kind of advertisements, pop-ups, ugly floating messages, links, images, services and features, banners, alerts, promotional texts, etc.
[IRCTC lightweight version]
This was done to speed up and streamline the whole booking process for ticket buyers. Since launch of the light version, IRCTC has witnessed increased rate of bookings and lesser amounts of failed transactions.
According to IRCTC spokesperson, the website has seen 4.63 lakh e-tickets bookings with an average of 9.47 lakh passengers daily as against 3.85 lakh tickets with 6.86 lakh passengers booked daily during 2013. The increased numbers translates to 20 percent rise in number of e-tickets booked and 38 percent rise in the number of passengers.
In terms of ticket booking revenue, IRCTC now has daily transactions more than Rs. 53 crore as against Rs. 37 crore in 2013.
IRCTC May Look For New Partners For e-tailing
Last Year, IRCTC tied up with Yebhi to launch their own e-commerce store which included products from categories like apparel, electronics etc (basically all products available on Yebhi.com). But it looks like IRCTC is not too satisfied with what has transpired as they are planning to float a new tender by the end of next month according to YourStory report, who cited an annonymous source.
According to the same source, IRCTC may start formal communication next month, and leading marketplaces like Snapdeal, Flipkart and Infibeam may bid for partnership.
Yebhi’s partnership with IRCTC has not been too successful, partly due to the fact that the ecommerce store has not been customized for the the kind of visitors IRCTC gets. In addition to that, the ecommerce store does not have deep integration with IRCTC’s main booking process and hence many ticket buyers do not even notice product availability.
Whatever the reason, it is quite likely that IRCTC may go for new partners when their existing agreement with Yebhi expires.
[…] happen on IRCTC portal are unmatched – They boast a user base of over 21 million users and have set a record of selling over 580,000 tickets on their portal in a single day earlier this year. Not sure if any other site even comes close to […]
[…] around 4.5 lakh e-tickets are booked on an average day, which can go upto 5.5 – 6 lakh during peak seasons. IRCTC now has daily transactions of more than Rs. 53 crore as against Rs. 37 crore in […]
[…] IRCTC set a record of 5.8 lakh ticket bookings in a day. Their daily average is around 4.63 lakh tickets. If you consider these numbers, it is quite clear […]