After a failed tie-up with Yebhi, IRCTC joins hands with Amazon to sell products online

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a subsidiary of the government controlled Indian Railways, has now tied up with Amazon to sell products online.

Last year Techcircle.in had reported that IRCTC was in talks with Amazon and Flipkart for a tie-up.

IRCTC handles the catering, tourism and online ticketing operations of the Indian Railways. It is the sole seller of railway tickets even though other OTAs come across as additional sales channel for booking in association with IRCTC. Under the agreement, IRCTC will leverage the huge traffic it generates being a virtual monopoly for train e-ticketing to sell products such as consumer electronic, books, shoes, apparel etc.

It has added a "shop on Amazon" tab on its homepage which redirects to a separate landing page on Amazon.in.

The railway spokesperson couldn't be immediately reached out to get more details on the partnership.

An email query sent to Amazon too did not elicit an immediate response.

In his previous conversation with Techcircle.in, a senior railway official had told that this move will leverage the site's huge database of over 21 million registered users and convert them into potential customers for third party e-commerce players and in turn act as an additional source of revenue through a fee or other mechanism for IRCTC.

In 2013 IRCTC had launched its e-commerce page which was powered by fashion and lifestyle e-tailer Yebhi. The e-commerce initiative of IRCTC had gone live with all the categories available at Yebhi.com, which included apparel, electronics, accessories, furnishings and kids.

The portal was marketed at the main IRCTC page and upon clicking it, users were redirected to a different page. It was an year long contract which was not extended, partly because Yebhi itself failed to get fresh funding and pivoted to become an aggregator for other e-com sites. Yebhi later pivoted to become an aggregator of third party e-commerce portals.