Recently IRCTC has created a lot of buzz in news. Thanks to the total makeover they did to their website including new business lines like flight booking, hotel booking & tour package booking. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) is a public sector company set up and fully owned by the Ministry of Railways. Can’t believe that a govt. run company can be credited with words like efficiency & professionalism then let the numbers speak for themselves.
- Out of total Rs. 9000 crores worth of transactions seen by Indian Ecommerce Industry in financial year 2009, IRCTC had a major pie with total transactions worth Rs. 3500 crores which is meaty 39%.
- On an average IRCTC get 0.2 million unique visitors every day with total of 5.5 million hits per day.
- More than 1.5 lakh tickets(including I-tickets) are booked everyday on IRCTC out of which 1500 are airline tickets at present. IRCTC is making Rs. 50 lakhs per day alone from flight ticket booking.
- Every day, around 8000 I-Tickets are sent to around 200 of India’s biggest cities daily in specially crafted envelopes.
Around 80% of total E-commerce market is captured by travel portals like IRCTC, MakeMyTrip & Yatra. Keeping aside all these rosy figures about IRCTC let’s talk about pure play online shopping in India which has annual transactions value worth Rs. 1300 crores in financial year 2009. Major players in this space are Rediff Shopping, EBay India, and Indiatimes.com. Currently India has around 8m online shoppers.
According to a recent study by IMRB International on Indian online shoppers
| Top 6 reasons given by shoppers in buying through Internet | Rank |
| Saves time & Effort | 1 |
| Convenience of shopping at home | 2 |
| Wide variety / range of products are available | 3 |
| Good discounts / lower prices | 4 |
| Get detailed information of the product | 5 |
| You can compare various models / brands | 6 |
As I see the current industry, there are few powerful forces in the Indian Shopping space which cannot be ignored by any company who is planning its Ecommerce operations in near future.
1. Young Brigade
a. Today’s youth have high disposable income & large appetite for leisure & entertainment.
b. Also 48% of parents agree that their children play a major role in decisions about household purchases and what brands to buy. Hence this is a major target group for Ecommerce companies.
2. Empowered Women
a. More of the women are getting educated & joining workforce. Also women really enjoys shopping and it’s a great stress buster for them.
b. In all classes, women do & make most of the shopping decisions. 85% of the time women have upper hand in making purchasing decisions in India.
3. Rising Non-Metro Aspirations
a. Tier II, tier III & rural area accounts for more than half the total market for TV sets, mobile phones, fans, pressure cookers, bicycles, washing soaps etc.
b. People in these areas have high aspirations but limited reach of big brands & designer products creates a supply gap.
4. New Age categories
a. Ethnic, traditional & customizable product category is fast catching people’s attention.
b. Beauty & health products along with natural & organic food category are fast catching Indian consumer’s attention.
5. Emerging Technology
a. With more than 500+ million Indian population having mobile phones, mobiles have become a much powerful tool than just a communication device. Cheap GPRS internet connections on mobile along with safe & secure mobile payment methods is giving a big push to m-commerce as well.
b. Social shopping is another trend which is catching user’s attention.
Looking at the current trends and a lot of new start ups like Flipkart, Infibeam, GoIbibo getting into this promising business, this space is really worth to watch out for.
Without a doubt the irctc site is quite an improvement but it does have a long way to go doesn't it ? What's with the pop up ads ? Then there's the fact that 20% of payment transactions fail- these are their official figures. The bit the upsets me most is that you can't easily find trains between 2 cities - especially 2nd tier cities. Try find a train between Indore and Rajkot !
ReplyDeleteIt upset me enough to build my own website - at www.bharatbyrail.com you just enter the cities you are travelling between, state the date and time range and it gives you the best trains, allows ample time for connections and finds routes between nearby stations not just the one you explicitly specify. Armed with these train numbers and times, you can go to IRCTC and make the booking.
Ideally, IRCTC would do all this itself. I'm sure in due course they will. Until then, we have to improvise and I built my own techniques at bharatbyrail.com - its totally free to all comers and totally ad-free.