Flipkart joins hands with Alibaba’s UCWeb, leaves app-only nightmare behind

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Flipkart seems to be racing to make up for the crucial time it lost chasing an app-only route last year.

Today, it announced a partnership with Alibaba’s UCWeb to have Flipkart’s new mobile site on the homescreen of UC Browser. This integration is aimed at enhancing the user experience even in low bandwidth conditions. It will also make Flipkart more easily accessible to hundreds of millions of users in India.

UC Browser is by far the most used mobile web browser in India, where 90 percent of smartphones run on Android. StatCounter puts the UC Browser market share at 52 percent; Opera and Chrome follow with 20 percent and 13 percent respectively.

“With over 50 percent of India’s internet traffic coming from hand-held devices, ecommerce players are witnessing huge traffic through the mobile. With higher spending power, better payment options, and increased smartphone penetration, this number will only see a steady rise,” Robert Bu, general manager of UCWeb India, says in a company announcement.

UCWeb will ”explore deeper cooperation opportunities” with Flipkart in the coming days as well, he adds.

The reverse gear

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Flipkart experimented with going app-only with its fashion portal Myntra last year. Users were redirected to the Myntra app when they visited the Myntra mobile site. Flipkart’s main site too went app-only on occasions like festival sales. After nine months of persisting with this strategy to wean users away from the mobile web to its apps, there was a rethink as global rival Amazon began to gain ground on the web. There were other hitches too, such as getting users to update their apps.

Finally, in a reversal, Flipkart shifted focus to the mobile web. It launched a Flipkart Lite mobile site, using new technology from Google to make it app-like in response time. The Myntra mobile site too was relaunched two months back. And since then, the mobile site of Myntra gets an average of 1.5 million daily mobile web visits, according to digital market intelligence firm SimilarWeb. Data showed that 68 percent of Myntra’s customers are now viewing the site on mobile.

See: It’s official: Flipkart’s app-only experiment with Myntra was a disaster

“With mobile becoming the main front where the next generation of shoppers are coming from, this launch [of Flipkart on UC Browser] strengthens our mission to create a responsive interface for users, even on the mobile web,” says Surojit Chatterjee, a senior vice president with Flipkart.