Why Flipkart and Myntra’s Mobile-Only Plan is Bad for You
Run a Google search for ‘mobile-only eCommerce site’ and Flipkart and Myntra are most probably going to be on the top of your results.
One of the articles is even titled ‘In Global E-commerce First, India’s Largest Fashion Portal Myntra Ditches Website, Goes Mobile-only’. It’s a bold move. Especially in a country where drastic changes are looked at askance.
The two giants are the biggest and the most revolutionary players in the Indian eCommerce scene. They set trends. They’re the go-to sites for a huge population that’s increasingly converting to the experience of online shopping.
To give you some perspective, Flipkart (which bought Myntra)is currently valued at $12.5 billion. A fresh round of funding could boost that to $15 billion.
And they’re trying to change the way people shop once again.
Myntra says that a whopping 95% of their traffic comes from mobile. And Flipkart says that 65% of their traffic is from mobile. The obvious thing to do is to go mobile-first.
The mobile-first principle was built on the premise that you should provide the best experience possible to the majority of your users, and it gained popularity when the shift to mobile usage was increasing.
If 95% of your buyers are purchasing products through mobile devices, it only makes sense to put your best foot forward for mobile and design exclusively for it, instead of just adapting web applications to fit a mobile screen.
But Flipkart and Myntra aren’t building mobile-first experiences.
They’re going mobile-only.
This might make business sense in terms of more control (hello, app permissions) and streamlined efforts, but mobile-only is a bad deal for users in more ways than one.
Is the Web Dead in eCommerce?
Let’s take the case of an app that was always meant to be mobile-only: Instagram. It still has a basic web presence despite the strong case for it to be mobile-only. And other popular apps like Flipboard that began as mobile-only are working hard to improve their web apps.
Flipkart and Myntra are doing the exact opposite.
Flipkart’s early adopters came from a young, tech-savvy IT crowd who preferred shopping online from their desktops. Today, Flipkart and Myntra want us to believe that most of their users have migrated entirely to native device usage, leaving them free to kill their web apps.
Well, the web is not dying.
And a lot of us still browse the web before we buy something online.
Where Does Good User Experience Begin?
User experience doesn’t begin with the app login page or the home feed. An eCommerce app’s experience begins right from the time a customer starts searching for a product, even before he or she enters the app.
Some reasons why we browse before we buy:
- Most of us research prices before buying something online if it’s a little above our budget.
- We check availability even when we don’t intend to buy (so it doesn’t go into a wishlist).
- We search for items by category online (Adidas running shoes for men?) and skim through all the sites that have that item.
- We want to share links with friends and family to get an opinion.
The key word here is search. Deep linking and search across mobile apps is still nascent, so most of our searching is done through web search engines.
And what happens when you find a result and click on it? You’re taken to a page that tells you to download the mobile app. That is not what you were looking for. It’s a maddeningly bad way to ask customers to download your app.
Flipkart has lost continuity and has voluntarily removed the chance for people to have a good multi-device experience.
And that takes us to the next issue: transition.
5% of Myntra’s users still use the web or the mobile site. More in Flipkart’s case. The harsh way they’re handling the transition where users are forced to use the mobile app is thoughtless and annoying.
Forced Friction — Not the Good Kind
‘But wait!’ you might say, ‘They don’t want to abandon 5% to 35% of their user base. That’s stupid. They’re still customers.’
They don’t. They’re just not willing to spend too much effort on retaining them. Chances are, a lot of people when they realize that they can’t use the web or mobile site will grumble for a few days and end up downloading the app.
Flipkart and Myntra are the most trusted eCommerce sites in India. And people are already used to ordering from them. It’s too much of a hassle not to download the app. They also give app-only offers to entice people, so much so that these ‘offers’ no longer seem like offers.
If you really want us to migrate to your mobile app, Flipkart, give us a better mobile app experience instead of throwing money at the problem and hoping it will go away.
This brings us to the app itself.
Mobile Apps that Don’t Make Shopping Easy
There are eCommerce apps with well-thought-out interfaces. Flipkart and Myntra are not among them yet. One of the reasons we go to the web app when we’re searching for an item is ease of use and speed.
For instance, search for ‘women’s tops’ and Myntra throws up approximately 17,000 results.
You can apply filters, but Flipkart’s app filters are exhausting. You need to endlessly scroll through options to find what you want.
It all comes down to experience. Users will find it easier to browse on a desktop or laptop, than on a mobile app. With Flipkart’s and Myntra’s ever-growing inventory, it just makes more sense.
What would work in this case is something like Roposo — a fashion discovery app that’s also mobile-only. Their image-based filters are designed specifically for a mobile app. Social validation and photo reviews help aesthetic decision-making on a small screen. And each product is pushed up the list based on social ranking from users, unlike Myntra or Flipkart where all the products are sorted only on the basis of your filter, making it harder to distinguish quality.
And checkout is another pitfall for the mobile-only model. From personal experience, mobile internet connections in India are prone to ‘signal dropping’ even in urban areas. I feel safer completing a transaction on my laptop.
What Users Really Need
Better mobile apps that invite us to shop on them, but a comforting web presence as well, when needed.
Flipkart and Myntra have way more web-related baggage than most mobile-only sites. But they’re still trying to stop people from using their web application. The message they’re sending is clear. They want data, they want more control that comes from having us confined on a mobile app, and they don’t want to give us a choice about it. This decision comes off as insensitive as best to a regular user.
So, Flipkart and Myntra, if you’re reading this, maybe the website should make a comeback as as a better version of itself. As users, we’d really appreciate that.
This post was co-written by Praveen Francis and Christina Preetha.
Praveen is an experience designer who’s passionate about user-centered products. He’s a frequent shopper of electronics on Flipkart.
Christina is a writer who loves good products and great stories. She shops for books on Flipkart and fashion on Myntra.
The Coffeelicious on Twitter.
