Railway Reservation through Mobile
This article is a step ahead on my earlier article on Online Railway Reservation Websites For India.
The world is moving fast and everyone is on the go all the time. In order to get train tickets, standing in queues is history, online reservation requires one to sit on a computer, which is a comfortable option, but not really possible all the time. Well, technology is keeping pace with the people’s lifestyles and there are many mobile applications available that can be used to book ticket with a phone, anywhere, anytime! All you need is:
1. A JAVA enabled mobile phone
2. GPRS, WiFi, 3G or any other medium to connect the phone to Internet
3. The Railway Reservation Application
How simple is that!
In this post I will discuss about the three mobile applications the are available on IRCTC, the railways’ official website . IRCTC has partnered with three applications and links to all of them are available on IRCTC website in the “Mobile Zone” section at the bottom of the page. Click on any one of the following links to know more about that application:
In order to book tickets using these applications, all you need to do is SMS your mobile number to a number provided by the providers or enter your mobile number on their website. They will send you an SMS with the link to the application. You will then need to download, install and configure the application on your mobile phone by providing a username, password and some other information.
All these are basically M-commerce applications that provide various other facilities like Flight Booking, Hotel Booking, Movie Ticket Booking, Bus Ticket Booking, Bill Payments etc. For booking train tickets, you need to browse to IRCTC and start your search. It’s fairly simple. The payment can be made by Credit Cards, Net Banking, Debit Cards, Cash Cards etc.
On successful booking, an e-Ticket will be sent to you by the application on the email address provided at the time of transaction. This ticket can be cancelled through ngpay itself.
Online Railway Reservation Websites for India
Most people like to travel, but no one wants to spend time and energy standing in log queues. When i was young, planning a trip was a big task and we went out only once a year. Why? coz my father did not have the time and inclination to plan the travel. Until a decade back, people used to stand in long queues wasting precious office hours just to get a rail reservation. Now that I’ve grown up, I and many others like me, travel often within India, usually every alternate month! The number of frequent travelers in India is going up, main reason for this is improving infrastructure in India and traveling is becoming easier, be it by any medium – road, train or air.
Indian Railways has done it’s share by starting online booking of rail tickets, helping people like me, who would rather not travel than stand in endless queues, just to get a ticket. The official Indian Railways’ website IRCTC was started in 2002, with a lot of loopholes, restricted online timings etc, but it still made a lot of business and since then, is one of the most useful portals to Indians all over the country. Till sometime back, it was the only player in the market but then government allowed third party websites to provide this facility as well. These websites have partnered with IRCTC. This means when you go for Online Reservation using any of these websites, your reservation details will also be sent to the Official IRCTC Database. All these websites completely rely on Official IRCTC Database. If the official database is experiencing errors or downtime, then none of these portals can carry out Online reservation until the Official Railway Reservation Database is back again.
IRCTC charges a service fee for each ticket. All the other websites also charge their own service fee (in addition to IRCTC Service Fee) for carrying out railway reservations through them. This additional charge ranges between INR 10 INR to 50, depending on Type of Train, Class of Travel, General/Tatkal Quota etc and differs for each portal.
All the Online Reservation websites offer both General and Tatkal bookings, choice of berth etc while making the reservations. They also offer ticket cancellation of e-tickets bought from them.
In order to get an an Online Railway Reservation (e-ticket), all one needs is the following:
- Internet enabled computer
- Identity proof (needs to be declared while booking and shown while travelling)
- Mode of payment (Credit card, debit card, net payment through account etc)
- Printer to print the e-ticket
- Age/Senior citizen proof (incase you took a ticket in Senior Citizen quota)
People who do not have access to internet can also make use of these websites by getting their tickets booked through local Internet Cafes, Agents etc that use online booking to reserve tickets for these passengers.
Here’s a list of some of the websites that offer online rail reservations. I’ve also tried to highlight some of the distinguishing features of each website.
Click on a logo for more information on that website
Read the rest of this entry »
Baby Products WebSites for New and To-be Parents
Being a mother to a toddler is a tough job, and being a shopper with a toddler is even tougher, both on you, and your little monster. After all how much shopping can one do in between stopping the little one from raking out toys from the rack, pulling on someone’s dress, tearing off packaging (of something that you don’t intend to buy, but end up buying!) and so on? From our month’s ration, half of the stuff we buy is for my daughter and the other half for both me and my husband.
All this cacophony made me switch my market visits with the online stores. I now try to buy as much as I can over the Internet and reserve the market visits for fun. Emergence of many new baby product websites make the task of buying for the little one simpler. In India, although this segment has a long way to go, some of the new players in market have started making life easier for us new parents.
Some of the websites that I found really useful:
First Cry : They call themselves “Asia’s Largest Online Baby and Kid’s Store”. Well, they certainly are largest in my house! They have a vast range of products and offer different discounts from time to time. The biggest saver being discounts on Diapers, keeping in mind the consumption in every household with infants/toddlers. Avoids me the pain in carrying the bulky packages too. By far, this website offers maximum discount on diapers as compared to any other player, be it an online store, pharmacy, retail chains like Big Bazaar, Easyday etc. First Cry also offers vouchers through various deal sites e.g. Snapdeal and Khojguru. They offer a large variety of toys for all ages from many big brands. The downside with toys here is that there aren’t too many options for lower budget. Not a great variety in clothes either.
They have a great 24/7 customer support that I’ve used many times, free shipping (orders more than Rs 200) and an option for cash on delivery (orders more than Rs 2000). Incase you are not satisfied with the product, they have a return policy too.
All in all, a decent shopping experience, saves a lot of time too.
First Cry
BabyOye : Started by young parents to make life simpler for other parents! BabyOye provides many options in toys. The best part is that they have a mix of both international and Indian brands. This makes purchasing easier as they also offer items that do not pinch a hole in the pocket.
A list of useful software tools – 3
Open Source & Free Hosted Customer Service Software – Comm100
Most of the Product/Services business required customer service which enables them to handle their customers. In this open world where every opinion counts, customer service becomes very important function of any business. To manage this function businesses generally prefer to use many tools which can help them to satisfy their customer needs efficiently.
I came to know about these set of tools provided by comm100 which are open source and free of cost for any organization/business to use as customer service software. Following are the services which any business can use at comm100:
1. Live Chat Software
2. Email Tickets
3. Forum
4. Newsletter
5. Knowledge Base
All of these services are really useful to service your customer with their concerns, questions and problems. These are also very important for converting a prospect to your customer e.g. you can offer a prospect to live chat your operator who can help him to know more about your product/services.
I would like to focus more on Live chat software in this post because I liked it most and another reason is that similar services are paid services. I remember, that we used to pay considerable amount of money for these kind of software. I also liked that most of the management is web based and all the operators can also work from any workstation for Live chat. You can check complete list of features of Live chat but here I liked most:
1. Free of cost 
2. Easy to start & setup, No installations(Web based).
3. Allows customizations
4. Clients available for Mobile clients like iPhone, Blackberry etc.
Before starting on using this for your business, you can also check set of screen shots provided by them. I will try to dig some more and will love to post more about other services.