Yebhi.com: Coffee shopping

Online shopping portal Yebhi.com, in association with Cafe Coffee Day (CCD), has launched 30 virtual stores across CCD outlets in Delhi and Bengaluru. The stores involve a virtual wall that showcases the range of products offered by the portal, along with their QR codes and Near Field Codes (NFC).

Speaking about the insight behind the idea, Nikhil Rungta, chief business officer, Yebhi.com, says, "We wanted to create a hybrid of offline and online shopping environment. It is more like coffee shopping. We did not want to do this activity around a metro station or airport as people in these areas are always in a hurry. Yebhi.com was looking to communicate with them in a clutter free environment and a coffee shop is a perfect set up for it."

The online portal aims to target students as well as office goers and has partnered the coffee stores near college campuses and corporate offices. The idea was that most people in these areas are internet-savvy, own smartphones and practice e-commerce. The average daily footfall at these coffee outlets is 400-500.

Yebhi.com is offering the users a discount of Rs 200.

The initiative is similar to one initiated in South Korea's subway stations by Tesco HomePlus. Called the HomePlus Subway Virtual Store, the activity brought the store to the consumers. It recreated lifelike images of store aisles in subway stations. The interactive innovation allowed people to shop from the store simply by taking pictures of the products with their mobile phones. In 2011, this activity bagged the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Media category.

In India, Homeshop18 also carried out a similar activity at Indira Gandhi T3 Airport a couple of months ago.

Speaking about how the activity scores over normal OOH, Rungta says, "OOH is done when we need saliency and branding but this activity will provide attention of the users as it engages them in a clutter free environment. Also, the innovation quotient is higher and adds a lot to recall value."

He further adds that nearly 10 per cent of Yebhi.com's business comes through mobile devices as users spend a lot of their time on them. So, engaging with users on this platform is necessary.

Yebhi.com was launched in 2009. It offers products for men, women and kids across categories such as shoes, apparel, accessories, mobiles, tablets, home and kitchen. The portal claims to have over 2 million customers. It has won many national and international awards for product and service excellence, including the Asian Retail Leadership award.