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

Photo credit: Anthony Kelly

One of the biggest stories last year in India was fashion app Myntra, owned by ecommerce leader Flipkart, going app-only. From mid-May onwards, anybody who tried accessing the Myntra mobile site on a browser was redirected to its app. The company said it was meant to improve personalization, but there was a competitive strategy behind it – forcing users to download the app and shutting out rivals.

The average smartphone in India has 32 apps, which is lower than the global average of 42. So if the leading apps occupy that space, there’s no room for others to muscle in. At least, in theory.

Amazon quickly took advantage. It gleefully thanked consumers for making it the most visited ecommerce site in India.

Flipkart was going down that path with its main ecommerce app too. Its Big Billion Day sale last year was app-only. “On the desktop, the browser was king. Not so in mobile. We’re already seeing that. You win in mobile apps, you win everything,” said Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, who was the CEO then, at a panel discussion in Bangalore.

But the strategy backfired badly. Flipkart’s global rival Amazon issued full page ads in newspapers, gleefully thanking consumers for making it the most visited ecommerce site in India. While Flipkart fiddled with its mobile strategy, the US giant had stolen a march on the web.

The flip-flop

After being in denial for a while, Flipkart abandoned its app-only plans by year-end to launch Flipkart Lite, a redesigned mobile site which the company called a “progressive web app.”

Whatever that meant, it was clearly a reversal in strategy. Last month, after nine months of being app-only, Flipkart’s fashion portal Myntra reopened its mobile site. “We want to give customers an additional reason to use Myntra,” said Flipkart’s new head of products, Ambareesh Kenghe, without going into why that “reason” was missing for nine months.

Photo credit: John O’Nolan

Myntra had been losing out big time on users who preferred to do their shopping on a browser rather than an app – contrary to what Sachin Bansal and the app-only strategists had thought.

Now there’s data to show just how much Flipkart and Myntra got hurt by that move.

Digital market intelligence firm SimilarWeb says the relaunched mobile site is a hit with Myntra users. SimilarWeb data shows that 68 percent of Myntra’s customers are now viewing the site on mobile compared to 32 percent on desktop. User engagement levels have also soared.

Since the relaunch on February 16, the mobile site of Myntra gets an average of 1.5 million daily mobile web visits.

Mobile web buzzes with shoppers