This startup is making a bold bet against Flipkart by pushing the mobile web

This week, fashion portal Myntra, which got acquired by Flipkart last year, is shutting off both its mobile and desktop websites to go app-only. Flipkart itself has already killed its mobile website – users who access Flipkart on a mobile browser are directed to its app download page on Google Play or Apple’s App Store.

Flipkart and Myntra claim they can give buyers a “deeply personalized” shopping experience only through their apps. What they mean is that they can track and profile users better on apps as well as prompt them to buy stuff with push notifications. So, by closing their websites, they want to force more of their users to download their apps.

Mobio Digital, a young startup from Kerala, offers an alternative path to etailers and others tempted to follow Flipkart’s footsteps. Its product Mobiopush, launched a few months ago, enables websites to send push notifications to desktop and mobile browsers. Just like an app, it assigns a unique key to every user of the website to gather customer intelligence.

Any user who visits a website with Mobiopush code embedded in it will be prompted to allow notifications. If the user accepts it, notifications from the website will come to the user’s notification area even if they’ve moved on to other tabs or applications. The user can choose to turn off notifications from any website whenever she wants.

Mohammed Aboobacker came up with Mobiopush along with two other engineering students – Anush Anilkumar and Navaneeth P.K. – last year when their startup was incubated at the Startup Village in Kerala. He tells Tech in Asia that more than 800 websites are using it. Initially, only Apple’s Safari browser supported it, but now with Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer also allowing website push notifications, they can be delivered across Mac, Windows, and Android devices. It’s also easier to use and less intrusive than browser extensions.

Mohammed Aboobacker (right) came up with Mobiopush along with two other engineering students – Navaneeth P.K (left) and Anush Anilkumar (center)

A friendlier way

Aboobacker claims that Mobiopush can make the user experience as deeply personalized on a website as it can be in any app. At the same time, it will save data usage and storage on the user’s mobile phone, which apps tend to guzzle.

“The main reason ecommerce businesses like Myntra and Flipkart abandoned their mobile sites is that apps allow them to engage with their users and send push notifications alerting them about new offers,” points out Aboobacker. “With Mobiopush, the same thing can be done through the mobile website.”

According to him, this is the friendlier way forward from the user’s point of view. Imagine if all the sites we use also go app-only like Myntra and Flipkart – how many apps will a user have to download and keep updating? And what will that do to the phone’s performance and battery?

Aboobacker is betting that the future will not be app-centric. Thanks to more processing power in phones and advances in Android and other mobile operating systems, mobile websites are becoming just as functional as apps, with access to the user’s location, phone camera et al. It’s only a few biggies like Flipkart with a large, captive user base who can think of shutting down websites and compelling consumers to download apps.