Body shopping is the practice of consultancy firms recruiting workers (generally in the information technology sector) in order to contract their services out on a tactical short- to mid-term basis.
[1][neutrality is disputed] Body shopping in IT originated during the mid-1990s when there was a huge demand for people with mainframe, COBOL and related technology skills to prevent systems being affected by the Y2K bug.
In the modern era of IT off-shoring, outsourcing, and cloud computing, it is widely accepted that IT service companies' strategy (especially for those operating with a huge technical manpower base in India) still continue to focus on similar lines.
[5] In one documented case study deemed as a typical example, a body shop in Hyderabad was able to win a 360 man-month deal with a U.S. company that urgently needed 40 IT workers with a very "specific" skill on a 9-month project.
Although the Indian body shop company could easily find lower paid workers in India for the job, the H-1B visa process would take too long to bring them into the United States to work.