Quick Q&A with Nikhil Rungta on the Yebhi-IRCTC deal and more

An MBA from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Nikhil’s internet journey began in 2006 with Yatra.com as their head of marketing. He then went on to Google, and was their first Country Marketing Head for India, where he managed both Consumer and B2B Marketing across all Google Products. And earlier in 2013, he shifted to Yebhi.com where he is the chief business officer currently. We got in a quick conversation with Nikhil to know about the recent Yebhi IRCTC deal and more.YS: Yebhi has scaled up at an impressive rate, tell us about the numbers.

Nikhil: Yebhi was launched in 2010, caters to men, women and kids and has products across segments. The site receives more than 2 lakh visitors each day and more than 10 transactions a minute. We have average cart size of Rs.1500 to 1600 with more than 5000 deliveries every day.

YS: What are some of the things you’re proud of?

Nikhil: We are proud to be the pioneers in many facets within the industry - having introduced concepts like Try and Buy, Yebhi Virtual wall, 1-Click Return, Yebhi Wallet and Yebhi Champs.

YS: About the IRCTC deal.

Nikhil: Yebhi.com partnered with IRCTC, Indian Railways ticketing portal, to power the first-ever government venture into online shopping. This was one of the biggest partnerships in the E commerce in India. Yebhi.com will be responsible for developing and managing the e-commerce platform for IRCTC. It will be responsible for end-to-end customer experience from User Interface design on the IRCTC Shopping page to final delivery of the product to the customer.

YS: How did the deal fall in place?

Nikhil: The partnership is based on a tender process that IRCTC opened in February this year to shortlist a partner for its online shopping platform. The tender was open for established Ecommerce companies with minimum annual turnover of INR 40 crore from B2C e-commerce business in the last financial year and having a catalog of over 500 brands and offer merchandise from minimum five product categories.

YS: How is the traffic like from IRCTC?

Nikhil: IRCTC gets close to 1.2 million daily visits generating 180 million transactions every year thus making it the largest Ecommerce site in the country. Yebhi.com receives close to 2 Lakh visitors per day, therefore accordingly it gets 60 lakhs visitors per month. Almost 25% of the IRCTC traffic is coming to the IRCTC’s shopping website, which is pretty good. We are happy so far with the progress. We see the partnership a huge boost to the fledgling eCommerce Industry in India and help taking online shopping to Real India.

YS: What is on the road map ahead?

Nikhil: We are aiming to break even in the coming 14-18 months. There is huge potential in Tier 2 / 3 markets we are working towards reach out to these target segments by offering value and fast fashion. We have a vision to become the most preferred e-commerce company in India.

Website: Yebhi.com