Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) had launched their E-Wallet feature in November 2013 with much fanfare. It was done so to ease the payment issues faced by users while booking their tickets on IRCTC website.
However, looks like, very few have actually registered for this e-wallet feature since launch 4 months back. Only 32,000 passengers have registered for it till date.
The IRCTC e-wallet scheme allowed passengers to first deposit a fixed amount with IRCTC through Credit/Debit, netbanking or other payment means available on the site. Once, the user account had e-wallet deposit, tickets could easily be purchased online using the balance in the account. So, everytime a user had to make a payment, they did not have any need to go to a third party payment gateway, where the chances of payment failures are high and also took much more time.
With e-wallet service, IRCTC planned to simplify the entire payment procedures.
In our view, the e-wallet feature is quite useful to passengers who travel by Indian railways frequently. But very few seem to have taken advantage of this. A paltry 76,000 tickets [source] have been booked using e-wallet since it’s launch. While the usage is increased over time (from 250 to 750 ticket bookings a day), it still remains small fraction of overall tickets sold on IRCTC website.
Recently, 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 that e-wallet feature is a huge failure.
Why People Don’t Use E-Wallet Feature?
There is no doubt that E-Wallet is a great feature for passengers as the time taken to book tickets reduces and rate of success if much higher. Even then, why so less people are actually using it?
In my view, IRCTC has not done a good job of marketing it. Very few people are aware of it. Registering for E-Wallet feature is also tad difficult, where they need to give their PAN number, create transaction password among other things. Most people will not go out of their comfort zone to create a new account and start using it.
Most importantly, e-wallet feature is not available for Tatkal bookings, which is the time such a service is really needed, but not available. If e-wallet becomes available during Tatkal bookings, I am sure the registrations will go up drastically!
Alos, most people don’t want to first deposit the money with IRCTC and then start using it. They would rather pay exact amount of money while booking the ticket rather than pay a bigger fixed amount before hand.
What do you think? Why IRCTC e-wallet has seen such less numbers?