Flipkart To Shut Down Website, Go Full Throttle on Mobile

While we anticipate that Myntra would be the solitary company to get its feet wet in the mobile-app only field, the latest news reports suggest that the India’s biggest e-Commerce player Flipkart is also planning to follow the streak.

 

 

According to Michael Adnani, vice president of Flipkart, “A year ago, 6% of our traffic was coming from mobile. In less than 18 months, that traffic is 10-fold. That shows the significance of what a mobile phone is doing for the consumers and consequently doing for us,”

 

The company seems to set up this move considering the popularity of its mobile app, which is yielding maximum traffic to them. As one may has observed over the last few months, Flipkart and Myntra both have announced gobs of app-only discount sale days. This is undoubtedly a move to test the waters and it seems like the numbers are talking.

 

Speaking of numbers, India is the third-largest internet market in the world after China and the US and as smartphones get cheaper each day, the number of web users is surely going to spike up in the days to come.

 

The decision for the shift to the app-base seems to be coming, since Flipkart hired former Google executive Punit Soni earlier this month as the head of products, partly to accelerate its push into mobile commerce and move sales away from web browser-based platforms.

 

Flipkar

 

Besides terming this decision as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘disgusting’, users are asking whether Flipkart doesn’t have ample money to run their desktop and mobile websites or what?

 

Some of the notable issues which have been shared by users related to this ‘autocratic’ and ‘dominating’ decision are:

  • Mobile apps can not give the experience which desktop sites do, which involve ease of navigation and product display.
  • What if the user concluded to uninstall the application due to low memory or slow speed? He or she won’t be able to shop any product?
  • Push notifications are sometimes annoying and several users uninstall the apps solely due to this reason.

 

user

 

Given that the users didn’t even adapt to give up on the mobile website, it isn’t arduous to predict how the users will react when an app only model is enforced. Actually, it’s a massive make or break kind of a gamble for the company. If they succeed, they can wholly outrank their competitors, but if things go wrong, this can even attest to being an exit point for them.