However, many customers still prefer shopping on conventional web browsers, even on mobile phones. “Websites push users to install the app. But only 4% of the people actually install the app. Flipkart doesn’t have a mobile website”.
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While it has been surfacing in the news about the Flipkart’s app-only strategy, the e-commerce giant seems to have now launched a lighter version of the actual website for mobiles.
India’s online marketplace, Flipkart, has brought its mobile website back to life, which has invariably made downloading its mobile application an option.
It is also being said that the new mobile browser experience has been built by the company completely using the Chrome development tools. While Flipkart’s primary motive now is to win more users to its platform, it’d be interesting to see how the new mobile version of website affects the count of native app users. “We gave Chrome a list of functionalities, which if they supported, could help us create a web application that worked like a native application”. All the things which weren’t possible in a mobile web before are now possible.
The Recode piece quotes Peeyush Ranjan, VP of Engineering at Flipkart who said that apps have the advantages of a cleaner interface and the advantage to stay offline. However, apps also have their weaknesses. It uses significantly less wireless data than apps. But with the changes proposed by Flipkart engineers and rolled out in the latest version of Google Chrome, the new mobile web experience can be as powerful as the app. “We started by saying how can we give the exact experience as an app in the mobile web”. But the full Flipkart experience is still available only on our native app. And the focus is not on traffic. “If somebody comes to us through a link, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to give them an app-like experience”, Ranjan said.
Desktop users are few in numbers and most or all of them also have smartphones, Ranjan said, when asked why Flipkart didn’t launch an app for desktop-based browsers.
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Google’s main profit source, its search engine, can not crawl, index and display content from apps as easily as information on websites.
