Yebhi

» see yebhi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i never had a reason to open yebhi. it sold shoes and clothes into India, out of Gurgaon, priced in rupees, to shoppers a whole subcontinent away from Ankara. i found it the way i find most of these now, going down a list of dead online stores that meant nothing to me and everything to somebody else.

it started as a shoe shop. in 2007 a young founder named Danish Ahmed built BigShoeBazaar.com, selling surplus branded footwear online, and it worked well enough that by 2009 it widened into Yebhi.com, a general store for clothes and accessories. the name reads as this too in Hindi, which fits a shop that kept adding shelves.

the timing looked right. Indian e-commerce was heating up and the money followed. in 2012 Yebhi raised a Series C of a hundred crore rupees, around eighteen million dollars, with Fidelity's growth fund leading and N. R. Narayana Murthy's Catamaran already on the cap table. it claimed something like 1.5 million registered users, maybe half a million who had actually bought something. for a moment it was named alongside the sites that would go on to matter.

then the ground shifted. Flipkart and Myntra were raising and spending on a scale Yebhi could not match, buying the same customers with deeper discounts and better delivery. on the 4th of September 2014 Yebhi stopped being a store. it flipped to a coupon and affiliate model, sending its own visitors off to Flipkart and the others for a cut, which is a polite way of saying it started working for the companies that had beaten it. the retail brand faded after that without much of an announcement.

~ the record ~

~ the money war ~

Yebhi died of a specific disease, the great Indian e-commerce cash burn. between roughly 2012 and 2016 a handful of players raised billions and set fire to it, selling below cost to win a market that did not yet exist at that size. a smaller store with eighteen million dollars could not stand in that fire. Yebhi had a real head start and a real brand, and it still got outspent into a coupon page. that is the whole story of that decade in Indian retail, told small.

~ the long tail ~

the people did fine, mostly. Danish Ahmed left to start other things, a product-discovery app and later a logistics venture. the Yebhi domain drifted. this is the ordinary ending for a store like this, no scandal and no fire-sale headline, just a business that ran out of road while richer ones kept driving. from where i sat it was never mine to miss, only a name on the far side of a market i was never shopping in.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »