After putting much time and effort into its Lite mobile variant, Flipkart is beginning to see significant results. The etailer says it has seen a 70% spike in its conversion rate after comparing Flipkart Lite with their previous mobile website in terms of actual purchases. It claims its efforts over the past year helped it get here.
The efforts are far from over
The online marketplace is definitely happy with the outcome of Flipkart Lite. However, it still has plans for an even better interface. The aim behind this project is to make the mobile experience as amazing as the native application revealed Amar Nagaram, vice-president of engineering at Flipkart.
His team is working on making Lite look and feel the same as the native application as well in terms of features. They are currently working on a feature that reads an authentication PIN sent to mobile phones without the need for users to type it in. The etailer calls it SMS capture.
To further develop the interface Flipkart like is working on a few technology-driven aspects. These efforts are intended to improve things for consumers using low-end phones and those in slow network regions.
Nagaram said Flipkart is working on improving load time with a feature it calls accelerated mobile pages.
“Our initial estimation is that it will bring down the load time by almost 70%,” he mentioned.
This feature is used by static news websites and is being implemented by an ecommerce platform for the time. This will be a task as ecommerce portals are very dynamic because product prices, stocks and availability change continuously and quickly.
With regards to the small screen interface, Nagaram said there wasn’t they can do. But they certainly will work on the ease of use.
Where does most of Flipkart’s traffic come from?
Flipkart divides its ecommerce traffic as follows:
- 70% traffic from mobile app
- 15% traffic from desktop website
- 15% traffic from mobile website
The online retail portal also said Flipkart Lite has brought 12% month-on-month traffic growth. It further states that the increase in traffic to Flipkart Lite is not a result of cannibalization but due to the addition of new users to its existing user base.
Last year, Flipkart was planning to follow Myntra with an app-only approach. The company’s ‘Project Shaw’ initiative to go mobile first was led by Punit Soni, the Chief Product Officer. The initiative was looking at shutting down the desktop site last September. But being unaware of how this would affect big ticket categories the etailer put its app-only plans on hold.
Once the etailer develops its mobile features for online buyers will it consider the app-only approach once more? Also, will the etailer look into seller apps and other selling features soon?
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