Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website has added a new feature that aims at easing the issues faced by ticket buyers on the site.

IRCTC e-wallet is similar to other wallet services available with other websites – the basic premise remains the same where user first deposits an amount with IRCTC through Credit/Debit, netbanking or other means available on the site. Once, the user account has e-wallet deposit, tickets can be purchased online using the balance in the account.

Given the woes faced by ticket buyers on IRCTC site, this may prove to be very useful, as the users will not have failed transactions, which were primarily caused during the payment authorization process. Infact, during peak hours many times users faced the issue where the money was debited from their bank account but the ticket never got book. And then there is a perennial problem of session getting expired, due to which the user had to start the entire process of booking the ticket all over again.

Booking through e-wallet promises eliminate all those issues, as the payment authorization will take place on IRCTC servers itself, making the process much faster and easier for the users. In addition to this, users can deposit upto Rs. 5000 at one go into e-wallet, so frequent users will be able to make multiple bookings without having to go through existing tedious payment authorization process.

How to create and use e-wallet account

• Once user logs into IRCTC website, they will be given a link to register for e-wallet scheme.
• User then registers along with their PAN Card number and creates a transaction password.
• The user will then get an email of successful e-wallet registration and instructions for money deposit.
• To deposit the amount in the eWallet account user will need to click to 'eWallet DEPOSIT' link on the left navigation bar. The user will need to then fill the amount to be deposited and reconfirm the same account. The amount has to be between Rs. 100 to Rs. 5000.
• Once the amount is deposited, user will get an option called "e-wallet" during the ticket booking process, using which they can book the tickets.
• User will need to provide their transaction password everytime payment has to be made through e-wallet.
• For every e-Wallet transaction an additional eWallet Transaction charge of Rs 5/- will be collected and booking will be allowed only when ticket amount is less than the balance amount.
  See the entire IRCTC eWallet booking process here.

In my view, it is a great new addition to IRCTC website and should surely ease the ticket booking process.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think of this new IRCTC eWallet feature!

Sequoia Capital puts $15m in Girnar Software, makers of Cardekho, Pricedekho & Bikedekho Internet portals

Sequoia Capital has invested USD 15 million Girnar Software, a software services and product development company based out of Jaipur. Although, the numbers are not official, as per ToI, Sequoia is expected to have 20 percent stake in the company, which will value 5 year old company at over USD 50 million dollars.

Girnar Software owns Cardekho, one of the India's leading auto portal gets 3 million unique visitors a month. Their other portals include pricedekho.com, an online product price comparison platform and Bikedekho.com, a portal that is exclusively dedicated to two wheeler information and comparisons!

Girnar Software was founded by 2 brothers Amit and Anurag Jain both IIT-Delhi Alumnus.

Online Fashion Brand FabAlley Raises Funding From Indian Angel Network

Indian online fashion store, FabAlley that is specifically focused on Women apparels and accessory store has raised undisclosed amount of funds from Indian Angel Network.

FabAlley was started by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik in 2012 with a singular focus of offering globally trendy apparel and accessories, which are all designed in-house. Tushar Singh from IAN will join the board post the deal.

The funds raised will be utilized to strengthen their manufacturing and merchandising processes

FabAlley is slightly different from regular online apparel and accessory store  – For one, they are purely focused on women and secondly the site actually makes suggestions based on style requirement of shoppers.

VoxPopClothing Raises $400,00 from Blume Ventures

Superhero Based design online apparel store Vox Pop Clothing has raised USD 400,000 from Blume Ventures. Apart from Blume, other investors from US and India also participated in the funding.

Vox pop clothing is a young startup launched in September of this year, designs and develops limited edition T-Shirts that are based on Movie and Television series characters. The have a license to use characters from production houses like Marvel, DC Comics, Disney and Star Trek.

Vox Pop Clothing not only sell their merchandize on their own site, but also have storefronts of ebay, Flipkart and Jabong.

Vox Pop Clothing was founded by Siddharth Taparia, a alumnus of Harvard Business School.

There have been host of other sites with similar offerings, but what differentiates Vox Pop is that they are themselves creating and manufacturing designs that are quite unique. Also, they are not relying solely on the business generated on their store-front, but are distributing their apparels to other ecommerce sites as well!

PayUPaisa, one of the leading online payment gateway in India has started offering a unique payment model for ecommerce merchants in India and it is called "Release on Delivery".

The model is quite similar to how escrow payments work – Essentially, shopper who is buying products online with "release on delivery" will first pay online for the merchandize bought, however, the payment will remain with PayUPaisa till confirmation from the buyer that merchandize bought is satisfactory.

When buyer explicitly informs PayUPaisa to release the payments, only then the money is transferred to the merchant. In case if PayUPaisa doesn't receive any confirmation from the buyer in 3 days after the product delivery, the payments are released to the merchant by default.

Here is how Release on Delivery works:

In India, over 60 percent of transactions that happen are Cash on Delivery. Though it is great for buyers, it is a very expensive model for merchants. The average cost per CoD transaction borne by a merchant is as high as 8% to 10% (as compared to an online transaction which costs 2% to 2.5%). Due to this, merchants margins are negatively affected to a large extent.

The operational cost for CoD transactions for a merchant include paying handling fees to third party courier service and costs are much higher in case the merchandise is returned back. In addition to this around 15 to 20 percent of CoD orders are not honored by the buyer further adding to merchant costs.

There is another reason that CoD transactions are high in India. Buyers are still apprehensive about online purchases. They do not want to part with their monies before they get merchandize in their hand. With Release on Delivery model, those fears will be put to rest, as the money is released only after explicit confirmation from the buyer.

From merchants perspective, even if half of CoD transactions are converted to RoD, they end up saving on operational costs due to CoD.

From buyers perspective, they also benefit due to faster refunds and faster dispute resolutions incase of mismatched expectations of product delivery.

This is a great feature introduced by PayUPaisa, we will need to see how many merchants actually implement it!

What is your take?

Update [21st Nov 2013, 18:00]: In a Facebook conversation, Abhishek Tripathi further described how the whole process will work. Here is the verbatim transcript:

1. PayUPaisa releases the payment to the merchant either on receiving information from the buyer or by default after 3 days of product delivery. Please do not get confused with that 3 days. 3 days is post delivery. Eg: You are a customer, used RoD, received the product, but you did not confirm the receipt of it on the dashboard, in that case the merchant cannot be kept waiting for the settlement right? So once the delivery is done and merchant informs us that the delivery is done with a proof of delivery, we still wait for 3 days for the customer to confirm on the dashboard, if not even after 3 days- We release it. (SInce we have got the proof of delivery)

2. In case a product does not match a buyer’s expectation or did not receive the product at all then PayU Paisa dispute team will resolve the dispute and ensure you get your money back. The dispute team is a mediator who talks to both the parties (Seller and Buyer) and resolves the issue- either replacement or complete refund.

3. Refunds will happen to the customer’s account (Same mode of payment which was used by the customer). There is no CASH involved so do not get confused with COD, money will be parked in escrow and refund cane be done directly to the customer as its with PayUPaisa , not with the Seller. A seller as well as the buyer gets a dashboard. Seller uploads Proof of delivery and thats how we get to know about the delivery.

4. That’s why its not a plain bank account, rather known as Escrow account. Yes we are not banks and not holding the amount for the lifetime, only till the product gets delivered or the dispute gets resolved.

Lo and Behold! It has finally happened. Feature phones, which have been on the rise since the start of mobile revolution in India have for the first time seen a drop in their sale.

According to CMR report, in the last quarter, July-Sep'13 that is, the total shipments of mobile increased by 10.9% to 62.9 million. The feature phones however saw a dip of 0.8% in the shipment.

The figure is minuscule but is still there. It is more important because along with this figure is the increase in sale for smartphones. The increase is a whopping 152%.

This is a trend that is likely to continue in the future as well. By the end of next quarter we might see accelerated decrease in feature phone sales.

With the falling prices of Smartphones, the attraction towards them is increasing consistently. Indian companies have played a huge role in it. In the smartphone arena, nearly half the market share belongs to them and they have certainly brought the smartphones to the masses. In the sub-10k range, the Indian companies like Micromax, Lava, Spice etc. have a plethora of offerings both in the smartphone and the tablet segments.

Samsung remains the market leader in the smartphone segment with 33.9% share followed by Micromax (19.7%) and Karbonn (9%). Overall however, Nokia still rules the roost with 18.9% market share. It is followed by Samsung (12%) and Micromax (10%). This shows how much faith Nokia had generated over the years with Indian audience.

I still feel it's a shame that Nokia so vehemently opposed Android. I strongly believe that if Nokia had released an Android phone, people would have jumped to it without looking at Samsung twice.

The most interesting data-point is the actual figure of shipments. Out of the 62.9 million phones, 51.8 million phones were feature phones while only 11.1 million were smartphones. This shows the amount of potential that is still untapped for the smartphones to capture. With the rise of internet connections on phones (both 2G and 3G) and the falling prices, it is obvious that the growth of smartphones will continue.

Another important thing is that while most feature phones are value phones (or budget phones), thereby having less margins for their manufacturers, smartphones (especially above Rs. 20k bracket) give huge dividends to their manufacturers.

This means that while the shipments for feature phones might still take a long time to be surpassed by smartphones (a year or two perhaps), the revenue and profits from smartphones will definitely overshadow feature phones before that. It might already have.

All in all, the downward trend for feature phones has arrived and with the amount of feature phones in the market, the smartphones have a lot of space to expand into.

When do you think the feature phones will finally be overtaken in sheer numbers by Smartphones?

Do you remember earlier we had told you that there are more Indian teenage users on Facebook than USA? Now a recent report by research agency eMarketer confirms that not only on Facebook, but compared to all the countries in the world, India is all set to have the highest growth in social networking!

Due to the saturation level in the developed countries which had spearheaded the growth of internet penetration, a slowdown was predicted. But this year, as per estimates, 1.61 billion people will log in to social networking sites at least monthly, from any electronic device. That's a 14.2% gain on social networker numbers from 2012, and double-digit growth is expected to continue for another year.

By 2017, 2.33 billion people will use social networks.

Which countries are on the top now?

Currently, the highest penetration of social network users as a share of total population occurs in the Netherlands, where 63.5% of all residents are social network users; Norway follows just behind at 63.3%.

Majority of residents in Sweden, South Korea, Denmark, the US, Finland, Canada and the UK also use social networking sites actively.

Who is driving the future growth?

When the developed countries are near saturation, the fastest growth in social network usage is happening in less-developed markets. India, with the highest growth this year, will increase user numbers by 37.4%, while Indonesia's numbers will climb 28.7% and Mexico will grow its social network user base by 21.1%.

Why India?

India has a very high population and an expected growth rate. India’s social network penetration currently stands at only 7.7 percent, below the average of 22.7 percent worldwide.

With the huge potential in the near future, driven by the falling prices of internet-enabled devices (read mobiles and tablets) and 3G rates as cheap as 2p/10KB along with a highly aspirational population which loves to show-off (you can see lots of cycle-rickshaw guys with a smartphone in the Indian capital), India is destined to be the social networking king.

Social Networking and Facebook are now spoken of in the same breath. India, Indonesia and Mexico are also high-growth areas for Facebook, the world's largest social network, which research says will reach a worldwide monthly user base of 1.026 billion this year.

Currently, US remains the single country with the greatest number of Facebook users, at 146.8 million this year, and India comes second, though a distant one. But with India's large population and high expected growth rate, it is believed it will develop the largest Facebook population of any country in the world by 2016.

Did someone say China? Since Facebook is banned in China, we assume there are no (or very few) users of the social network in the country.

So its advantage India all the way for now. Will we see an entire ecosystem flourishing around social networking now, just to ride the wave?