This month, deals only site Groupon managed to get three times more traffic to its site by selling onions at Rs 9 per kg. It got more traffic through the widespread media coverage and mentions on social media. As the Indian e-commerce market gets increasingly competitive with at least one company entering the ecosystem every month, players are looking at tie-ups with other larger travel portals, bloggers’ Web sites, banks to announcing flash deals to drive more traffic to their own sites.

These partnerships are not only helping e-tailers to create a large customer base but also reduce the cost of customer acquisition (the investment done to get one customer).

Fashion retailer Yebhi.com tied up with Indian railway portal IRCTC in July this year to reach out to customers, who have never shopped with Yebhi.com or people from far-flung areas. Through this, the company expects a whopping 60-70 per cent jump in its revenues in another six to eight months.

Nikhil Rungta, Chief Business Officer, Yebhi.com, said, “We are seeing almost 25 per cent increase in traffic from IRCTC coming to Yebhi.com post the integration. We are getting orders from places like Gorakhpur, Darbhanga and several such small towns from across the country, which are accessible only by trains.”

Rungta said Yebhi.com gets close to 100 million visits per annum and does over 2 million transactions every year and these figures are excluding the IRCTC’s partnership. It provides a white-label solution for the railway ticket booking site, which is known as the country’s largest e-commerce portal getting close to 1.2 million daily visits and generating 180 million transactions every year.

Similarly, Bangalore-based Myntra has partnerships with travel portals such as Yatra and Cleartrip where customers are given gift vouchers and other promotional offers on each ticket purchase. “We witnessed almost 10-12 per cent jump in sales through such channels,” said its co-founder Ashutosh Lawania.

According to Narasimha Jayakumar, COO of Homeshop18, everybody is vying for traffic at a cheaper or no cost at all. Most of the e-commerce sites get paid traffic through Google Adwords, which currently forms about 60 per cent of the total traffic garnered.

“Through such tie-ups with travel portals, the percentage of paid traffic has come down. It also helps the other partner in a similar way,” he said, adding that travel portals get 3-4 times more traffic than the non-travel sites. The company has also partnered with banking sites, mobile recharge sites and portals doing concierge services for corporate firms.

Craftsvilla.com, which sells ethnic products, has almost 100 per cent organic (unpaid) traffic, which it derives from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and large number of bloggers in India and abroad. “We see 10-15 per cent month on month traffic increase from these referring bloggers,” said its co-founder Manoj Gupta. He also added that it benefits both parties as the traffic from these blogs is highly filtered, targeted and has intention to buy since they are more sophisticated online buyers. It also helps bloggers in generating specific content which helps them keep their audience engaged.

Another online marketplace Pepperfry.com plans to ink similar partnerships soon.

Kumar Goursundar Das, Research Manager, IDC Retail Insights (Asia Pacific), said the increased competition from various channels including e-tailers has affected the online business and sustainability has become the key concern. This is driving the companies to find new alternatives to reach a bigger customer base.

“Growth has also been slow and the percentage of Internet users buying online has just grown by 3.8 per cent in the last two 3-4 years. We would see other new business models in coming days as e-commerce matures in India,” he added.

>priyanka.pani@thehindu.co.in

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