Yebhi's co-founder Danish Ahmed quits to start Shopsity

Danish Ahmed, CEO of online fashion and lifestyle retailer Yebhi.com, has exited the company. He has started Shopsity Tech Pvt Ltd, a company that provides information on fashion products being sold in the users' vicinity through an app.

Ahmed terms Shopsity, the company's Android-based app, as 'anti-ecommerce' play.

Despite working in an e-commerce portal, he feels that time is still not ripe for fashion products to be sold online. " Ecommerce is efficient, but boring and unnatural, while shopping was laborious, but fun. Therefore, neither model really nailed it, it was just one better than the other," said Ahmed.

Run by Gurgaon-based Big Shoe Bazaar India Pvt Ltd, Yebhi had started as BigShoeBazaar before it became a horizontal e-commerce merchant dealing in categories such as apparels, accessories, home furnishings, toys, electronics and online mobile recharge.

However, the company has been witnessing tough times in the recent past. Ahmed is not the first co-founder to exit the company. Last year, Nitin Agarwal and Rajul Jain had quit Yebhi to start their own ventures.

Board members Rahul Rai, MD of FGPI and Suvir Sujan, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners had quit the company in September 2013.

Last year, Yebhi.com pivoted yet again to become an e-commerce site aggregator.

Ahmed's decision comes at a time when the online shopping landscape is dominated by players such as Myntra and Jabong.

Says Ahmed: "We are trying to bring the convenience of online shopping, with the experience of offline shopping. With Shopsity a customer gets to see what is selling in stores nearby, while he is sitting comfortably at home. He can choose the designs of his choice, check out the latest offers, see size availability, make a shopping list and then go out to experience the product."

Shopsity has over 2000 stores from Delhi/NCR, already listed on its Android app. Over the next year, the company targets to take that number to over 40,000 across the top 10 cities.

The startup operates on a model similar to NCR-based startup, Zakoopi, which has launched a search engine to provide listing of offline fashion stores across Delhi and NCR.