Lite version targets low end smartphone users.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The Bangalore-based e-commerce giant Flipkart has relaunched its mobile website that was closed down a few months back, renaming it as ‘Flipkart Lite’.
According to reports, by relaunching the mobile website, the company aims at reaching more buyers who don’t intend to install the app on their smartphone due to various reasons such as lack of storage or data barriers.
Knowing that a large number of mobile users in India don’t like to be bugged with app notifications and regular over-the-air update, Flipkart engineers had met development team in Google’s Chrome and Android division to assist them in making a new mobile website that can replicate the features of their app when used along with Google’s platform.
The relaunch of the mobile website comes at a time when the speculations about the e-retailer going app only were getting stronger. Earlier, Myntra, the fashion website owned by Flipkart had gone app only.
Flipkart and other online e-retailers have been depending largely on its app, depriving desktop users of many festival offers that are enjoyed by app-based users.
There are also reports that the search engine giant google has been asserting the importance of maintaining a good mobile-friendly website as its crawler reported problems while trying to index pages from apps, resulting in some premiering websites to fall back on search engine result page (SERP).
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Flipkart is the first India Company to get the assistance of Google in building a lite version of their website to help it load faster on low-end smartphones. Also, Flipkart Lite will work even when the device is offline, thanks to its caching feature.
A few days back Google had announced that “pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly”.
Starting from the last few months, users who tried to open the Flipkart website using their smartphone started getting redirected to the app page, prompting them to install it from Google Play or App Store. Users who faced storage difficulties and data constrain had to leave the page distraught.
The new Flipkart mobile friendly page will use the new notification feature of Google Chrome and frequent visitors can bookmark the page in the home screen of the browser so that they can access the e-commerce website with just a tap on the screen.
Flipkart had also made its Big Billion Days sale an app only affair this year, whereas last yar it was open for all users, regardless to the platform they used.
There were also speculations about the company making a sudden diversion to app only strategy as early as this September, but the company denied the reports and said, “India is gradually transitioning from a mobile first to a mobile only country… We are constantly experimenting with various aspects of our service to create the best shopping experience for our users on our app.”
“At Flipkart, we have been following a mobile first approach and 70-75 percent of our total traffic is already coming from our mobile app,” it added.
Flipkart’s reconsideration of their mobile friendly website has raised serious questions to other e-commerce websites that were in hushed up discussions about replicated what Flipkart did with Myntra. The relaunch of the mobile web version of Flipkart is an acknowledgement of India’s fragmented Internet user base.
Even though the country boasts of an ever-increasing mobile user base, the authorities have failed to provide the infrastructure necessary for seamless internet connectivity across the country. 3G was a terrible disaster as far as users are concerned as many still await eagerly to seen the 2G symbol disappear from the mobile. Ironically, all eyes are on 4G, which has started rolling out in phases.
Also to be noted is the kind of device that a majority of Indian smartphone users buy. According to statistics, first-time buyers prefer to have a low-end smartphone, which essentially means less storage capacity. With storage space being a big constraint, people are dissuaded from downloading and installing apps that are becoming heavier with each new update.
Unless the user is a frequent hopper of online website, the app doesn’t meet the expectations of a lay user who would prefer to make use of the storage space for songs and other entertainment stuff.
Another big factor that dissuades buyers from using the apps is the frequent failures during the payment. Even though users are no more hesitant to make online payment – thanks to RBI’s One Time Password integration – due to slow connectivity, transactions tend to fail.
The comparatively small screen size of the low-end smartphone is yet another hurdle that causes errors. Considering all these factors, many users prefer to use their desktop rather than the app to purchase their favourite products.
Even though all major e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon say that they are registering heavy traffic from mobile apps, in a country like India where the users are fragmented, restricting access to the products through app could mean failing to cater to a large chunk of prospective buyers.