OyeSeva is a unified online marketplace encompassing food, books, magazines and curio items and any other services that a traveler consumes in the course of his journey. By 2020, OyeSeva aims to become the number one go-to marketplace for train and bus journeys, offering more options and better choices to travelers.
Idea OyeSeva recognizes that long train journeys provide limited options for travelers at the place and time of their choice. In a time when the expectations of the people are increasing, OyeSeva’s objective is to ensure easy, convenient and reliable availability of the variety of products available on a railway station through an easy ordering system (website, app, and call centre) which is backed with an on-berth delivery mechanism.
OyeSeva provides a unified online marketplace encompassing food, books, magazines and curio items and any other services that a traveler consumes in the course of his or her journey. OyeSeva can be accessed by the travelers at their convenience before as well as during their journey, to place orders for products or services that can be delivered to them at their berths, at their specified halt during the course of the journey. In addition to this, OyeSeva also endeavours to provide OyeSeva Travel Kits for adults, ladies and children. These kits will have an assortment of products that would be of use to a long distance train traveler.
Team The diversity of the OyeSeva team ensures that it has the skills and knowledge that are imperative for the successful implementation of a project. The co-founders, Annie Kumar and Jeethmal Mutha, have close to 20 years’ experience of running successful businesses. While they bring in their knowledge to identify new opportunities, the execution team headed by Ramesh Jujjavarapu (B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur) and Shalini Tripathi (MBA from IIM Bangalore) brings in its expertise of business development, operations and team management, and software application development. The team is committed to understanding and managing customer expectations.
Why OyeSeva?In a time when convenience is the key to attract and retain customers, OyeSeva ensures that every step in the ordering experience focuses on convenience. The ease of buying food, books and other essentials during journey far exceeds the experience of carrying these items from home. With no delivery charges, no minimum order value and robust customer support operations, OyeSeva ensures that convenience, choice, personalization and efficiency are just a click or phone call away. With 220 million users, India is now world’s second-biggest smartphone market, and the number is only growing. India has also seen a surge in online shopping in the last few years with more and more buyers getting into the habit of making purchases online with digital payments.
More Options Better Choices As a part of its go digital initiative, Indian Railways in partnership with Google has reached two million people who are logging on to free Wi-Fi every month at major railway stations across India. Creating an online marketplace for authorized vendors to reach out to travelers is a step in keeping with the times of moving shopping online with digital payments and the promise of assured delivery, ensuring that the travelers are provided with quality products of their choice at reasonable prices.
Plans for 2017 OyeSeva was incorporated in May 2016, and the initial few months were spent in extensive market research, building the vendor network, developing the software and setting up operations. After successfully completing the proof of concept, OyeSeva launched its beta services across the Central Zone of the Indian Railways in February 2017. The company has started out bootstrapped by the co-founders. Following the proof of concept, the concept was presented to around 7 members of the investing community. All of them found the concept to be interesting, and 4 of them asked to revert following the beta launch. Accordingly the company plans to revisit them and other investors following the completion of the beta in the next couple of months, for fund raising to realize its goal of expanding to other railway zones over the next two years. The company has also initiated talks with some of the road transport corporations to introduce similar services for long distance bus travelers. By 2020, OyeSeva aims to become the number one go-to marketplace for train and bus journeys, offering more options and better choices to travelers.
BW Reporters
Vaishali Dar is a Senior Associate Editor with BW Businessworld and Editorial Head with BW Disrupt. She writes on corporates, start-ups, hospitality and travel
