Flipkart Loses Race, IRCTC Ties Up With Amazon To Capture Indian Ecommerce Market

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has tied up with Amazon.in to foray into ecommerce once again. IRCTC has added a new tab on its website “Shop on Amazon” which on clicking redirects customers to the Amazon website.

IRCTC had floated a tender to find a new player who could run the co-branded ecommerce marketplace last year. Earlier, there were reports that both Amazon and homegrown Flipkart were in talks to sell their merchandise through IRCTC’s portal.

With this deal, the customers can now be accorded seamless online shopping opportunities in addition to booking travel tickets and hotel accommodations. They would be able to buy products ranging from consumer electronics, books, shoes, apparel, bags to toys, exotic food products, personal hygiene products, pet supplies, musical instruments and many more, at the click of a button and benefit from Amazon.in’s wide distribution network.

“The tie-up will give crores of our travellers and customers the joy of an easy and convenient shopping experience as we have made the online shopping site as our preferred partner for a period of two years,” a senior IRCTC official said.

While this is something Amazon can rejoice about, but on the other side, this seems to be bad news for the homegrown Flipkart which is doing every bit to exceed in the Indian ecommerce segment.

The partnership follows in the backdrop of the ecommerce portal it had launched with fashion etailer Yebhi in 2013.The portal was marketed at the main IRCTC page and upon clicking it, users were redirected to a different page. However, this stint with Yebhi failed miserably and the contract was rescinded.

While IRCTC, is a subsidiary of the Indian Railways and India’s largest eticketing platform, that also handles the catering and catering operations of the railways, Amazon is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States.The company produces consumer electronics and is a major provider of cloud computing services.

Recently, IRCTC  introduced the CoD– cash on delivery option for travellers to buy tickets from its platform. It partnered with Gurgaon-based Anduril Technologies which owns and operate Bookmytrain.com to offer COD services to the company.

Let’s see if Amazon and IRCTC are able to  leverage IRCTC’s 21 Mn consumers and how the tie up pans out.