NR Murthy-backed Yebhi tweaks biz model for 4th time

Moneycontrol BureauIn what could signal the first signs of impending consolidation in the fast-growing but competitive ecommerce space, Yebhi.com has turned itself from an online retailer to a products aggregator.This is the fourth time the website has tweaked its strategy: it started life as a website focused on footwear, then moved on to become a full-fledged inventory-led lifestyle store before adopting the marketplace model (where it would only list products of offline sellers).The website, which has raised about Rs 150 crore from private-equity investors including Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, had been struggling to keep pace as rivals as Myntra and Jabong raced ahead.Under the new business model, customers can now browse through a catalog of products listed by other websites from where a visitor can select a product before proceeding to buy it from there.The change was announced by Yebhi on its Facebook page. The new business model will be much less capital intensive, CEO Danish Ahmed told the Hindu Business Line. He added that in the new avatar, Yebhi would target revenues of about USD 5-60 million. Experts believe the online ecommerce industry will mature into one housing only a few mature players with deep cash while the rest will either drop out or be sold/merged.Even as rivals raced ahead buying raising millions, or even billions (as in the case of homegrown Flipkart), of dollars, experts told the Business Line that a fund crunch that resulted in Yebhi’s failure to scale up was behind its failure as a marketplace.Recently, the company was also hit with a top management exodus, with the co-founders leaving to start their own ventures while a number of board members as well as the chief business officer quitting recently, according to digital media tracking website MediaNama.