Comments on: e commerce in india: IRCTC still contributes 1/3rd – Something to worry about?

By: Terry Near

Terry Near — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:49:21 +0000

Happy day, thanks for your post, I appreciate the great content. I’ll be back soon to read more!

By: Ninja

Ninja — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:55:20 +0000

Nice post. Interesting points you have raised regarding increasing ecommerce usage – first problem is how do you bring e-commerce to the mass? If you look around, every city (metro, town, etc) has numerous shops that advertise irctc online booking outside their shops. Nobody does that for other sites. A lot of net-ignorant people use these shops to do online booking thru irctc
99% of people like us (who are able to read this post and this comment) would have definitely used a portal/website other than irctc to do online transactions.

And there lies the main issue.

By: Shailendra

Shailendra — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:38:28 +0000

I think extremely poor service contributes to this general distrust of services online in India. In the past, I have tried to order from the biggest shopping portals in India. One of them shipped a defective product, another cancelled my order 8 days after I had placed it.

Even after several years of existence none of Indian online shopping portals have been able to ramp up or gather critical mass. I am afraid it is turning out be to be a chicken and egg situation. Because of lack of customers scales are low, they are unable to ramp up and provide cost effective services. Because service is not up to the mark, they are unable to attract more customers.

The end result is, we are still awaiting India’s Amazon!

By: Ravi Rao

Ravi Rao — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:54:21 +0000

So you mean sit down and do nothing?

By: raghu

raghu — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:37:01 +0000

people use the internet to find the lowest price, trust me if u go for relationship based model, its bound to fail

By: Anshul

Anshul — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:43:57 +0000

@Ashish
I have reservations about the Barriers you have mentioned. I think following are the more critical:
1. High cost of Payment gateway integration.
2. Broken Logistics system.
3. Information flow between vendors is not efficient. Its still conventional phone based system.

Cannot negotiate doesn’t matter in online shopping IMHO. I remember seeing this in a survey report and frankly that was not upto the standards.

I can elaborate on each of the points but then this comment will again become like a post in itself

By: Sidharth

Sidharth — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:44:28 +0000

I think this has got something to do with price. I always find prices for consumer electronic items like mobiles. tv etc to be higher online than at your local stores. The online retailers have to probably be looking at dynamic pricing. Web is great for purchases like books and old movie DVD but for big ticket items they need to rework their prices.