Deconstructing Flipkart and Myntra’s product strategy

The last few months have been the best in terms of startups getting significant funding. This will boost ecosystem morale, but in the long term its only the product strength that is going to determine the winner.

In this context, it is interesting to see the recent product releases of Flipkart and Myntra. The maximum impact though, was created by Myntra’s move to go app-only and Flipkart following through with the same strategy (some reports say this strategy is on hold).

As I see it, there is a clear trend emerging out of both these specific products and this trend does align with the industry in general. The company isn’t just trying to adapt for mobile but it is building the product ground up in the mobile world. In this transition, it is making its products personal, prioritizing engagement over transaction.

What essentially becomes translated into a vision where Myntra becomes a fashion assistant and Flipkart becomes the shopping assistant.

The belief here is that if there is engagement, transactions will happen as a natural corollary. As an example, let’s take the latest feature “ping” which is available on the Flipkart app. The belief is that when I shop, I would want to invite my friends to comment, suggest etc, because shopping and sharing is a clear “social” activity, coupled with the need for “instant recognition”.

The same could have been implemented on the web but would have required the shopper and his/her friends to be online at the same time whereas on mobile everyone is permanently connected.

Hence, the feature is mobile only. This is probably the first in a string of mobile only features that Flipkart would release. This may not exactly result in an increase in transactions immediately but this will definitely help to build engagement, it gives people much more reason to be on the Flipkart app.

If this feature catches on it might result in a new type of product review system which would be real time and synchronous, massively undermining the current review mechanism existing with other ecommerce players.

With more engagement comes more data and more patterns. When you view it in the context of recent announcements of Flipkart hiring machine learning and AI experts, it starts to fall in place that Flipkart wants to know more about you, your likes, and your conversations. The aim is really to help you to shop right and shop more. The aim is to be a shopping assistant.

Myntra’s recent announcement that it’s aspiring to be the Facebook of fashion, which translates into communities, comments, likes, etc. The aim again here is the same: deeper engagement. This is more of a content driven strategy than a purely engineering driven one.

To understand this in context imagine Myntra to be an endless fashion magazine, which also allows you to buy the products you like instantly.

Effectively, you are just carrying this magazine in your pocket and every time you pull it out there is more content available which in turn fuels a greater desire to buy.

In short, as I see it, Both Flipkart/Myntra are not aiming to be shopping destinations (like they used be on the web). They are aiming to be your real time shop assistants, it would be interesting to see how that pans out.