TCS Shuts Down its Struggling eCommerce Business Yayvo.com

Yayvo.com, a TCS-backed e-commerce venture, is shutting down operations after 8 years of squaring off against both veteran and startup darlings in the space.

Despite entering the market in 2014 with a lot of momentum behind it, Yayvo somehow failed to top the Pakistani e-commerce market with players like Daraz, Alibaba, and Amazon ghosting in and forcing the company out of business in a little over three years.

An e-commerce site of TCS E-Com (Pvt.) Limited, Yayvo.com offered a wide range of leading local and global brands, including electronic gadgets, mobile phones, fashion apparel for men and women, home decor and lifestyle goods, books, edible items, and much more.

In the early days, Yayvo’s media campaign ran a large number of spots highlighting its offerings at its launch, but they appeared to be skewed towards appliances rather than clothing, accessories, shoes, and so on, which now dominate the e-commerce space in Pakistan. They could have started with these as well but waited until it was too late.
While this can be attributed to a rookie error, some issues with Yayvo remained prevalent after nearly seven years. Founded in 2014, Yayvo at one time used to sell over 150,000 products on its website, ranging from detergent to mobile phones and televisions.

The offerings on the website were always thin, but this could simply be due to the portal layout, which did not effectively highlight the full range. The website struggled to stand out until the end, with many of the layouts and features appearing to be outdated.

E-commerce in Pakistan is still in its early stages, but it is rapidly expanding. Alibaba’s acquisition of Daraz may have made them the front runner, but it is surely a done deal now since businesses like Airlift and Yayvo have taken the plunge. Yayvo, with its unique logistics advantage, had all the right ingredients to rise to the top as the market developed and matured before Alibaba entered Pakistan.

With things a little too out of reach at this point in time, coupled with economic issues faced by the country, it looks like the company had no other choice but to close shop for good.