When Flipkart opted to ditch its mobile website and go app-only, there were many debates whether Indians are ready for this change and whether other Internet firms do so or not. Now, Flipkart has relaunched its mobile version of the website, making it pretty clear that it might not be having the best of the times going app-only.
There are nearly 70 million mobile-only users and around 60 million desktop users in India. However, nearly 55 million users choose to use both devices. Thus, there is no other way for Flipkart — or any other big internet brand for that matter — than to be available across all possible platforms for more customer acquisition.
The new mobile website of the company combines the snappy mobile app experience with the ease of surfing standalone websites. The company claims that this is the first such offering, globally.
Flipkart’s engineers worked closely with engineers at Google in order to enhance the ability of Google’s Chrome browser to make websites as powerful as mobile applications.
Peeyush Ranjan, Flipkart’s Head of Engineering and a former Google executive, said,
We started by saying how can we give the exact experience as an app in the mobile web. We took a list of things to Chrome and said can you support this behaviour. They went and modified Chrome and we launched a new mobile website on top of it. This is going to be an open web standard such that all the mobile web applications will soon rival native applications.
Last month, Flipkart offered an app-only sale for online buyers but it didn’t reflect the results which were expected by the company.
Flipkart was founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Till now, the company has raised $3.15 billion in 12 funding rounds from 16 investors. It offers over 20 million products across 70+ categories and has more than 26 million registered users.
