Why is Flipkart redialling mobile web in India?

Photo by Samrat Mazumdar

Indian ecommerce giant Flipkart has just hit the refresh button by enhancing its mobile website. Has it just discovered that going app-only on Indian smartphone users may not be such a smart move after all?

Users now have Flipkart Lite, which the company calls a “progressive web app”.

App-only

The company has been testing the waters for a while now. As recently as last month, its five-day Big Billion Days sale was available only on its app. In April, its website directed users to download its app. And Flipkart’s Myntra went app-only. But since then, the fashion portal’s sales growth has stalled.

Why mobile web

In India, most online users search the web on their mobile phones – 72 percent of all online activity is done on mobile.

So it is important for ecommerce companies to have a mobile web presence. Flipkart generates around 75-90 percent of its traffic from the mobile platform.

What doesn’t work

While an app offers a neat design and offline capabilities, it is bulky, downloading can be a pain, and requires frequent updates.

That’s particularly tricky in countries like India where a bulk of people come online with low-end Android phones that are infrequently updated.

As Tech In Asia had pointed out earlier, there may be over a million apps out there, but a phone will usually have no more than 50 – and the budget smartphones popular in India will have fewer. Half of them come pre-installed, which leaves even less room for apps to be downloaded and retained.

Amazon India and Snapdeal, two other ecommerce giants in India, also get most of their clicks from smartphones, but they haven’t been as aggressive as Flipkart in pushing their apps.

Many Indians still prefer buying on conventional web browsers, even when they are on their mobile phones.

A combination of all these factors could have made Flipkart rethink the bounties of the mobile web.

Google help

The company has used the Chrome and Opera browsers to introduce web-based apps. These will offer a shopping experience similar to that of so-called native apps which need to be downloaded on phones.

The new browser app will allow users to go to its mobile site directly from their home screens and enable notifications and other app-type features, the Mint newspaper reported.