Eye on next 100-200 million, Flipkart to revamp its app

BENGALURU: Homegrown e-commerce company Flipkart, owne d by US retailing giant Walmart, is revamping its app to get the next 100-200 million Indians to transact on its platform.

The rejig, which includes a regional language interface, video streaming, and feeds to make itself more social, indicates a strategy shift to expand to a larger local and social engagement-led platform from a pure ecommerce destination.

The changes will entail launching the app in Hindi to drive adoption, introducing video content in collaboration with Over The Top (OTT) media services, and launching feeds for product-related content marketing.

“With this, the shop (the Flipkart app) itself will completely change,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Group CEO, Flipkart. “Our focus at Flipkart has been to tap the growing middle class, sub-30 year old, value customers across smaller towns and cities, and we believe the way to do that is to replicate a customer’s offline shopping experience on the app,” he said.

Flipkart said it has collaborated with several content platforms to offer a curated range of movies, shows and entertainment series called ‘Flipkart Videos’, which it will look to monetise through ads.

“While we are starting with partnerships, in the next six months, we will have a broader video play. We believe that our customers shouldn’t pay extra for premium content,” Krishnamurthy said.

Targeting the next 100 million users is largely pegged as the next phase of growth for e-commerce firms, given that only 50 million of the Indian Internet economy’s half a billion users have ever transacted online. In that context, content is seen as the gateway to commerce. Other initiatives include financial inclusion, driving affordability, strengthening technology and engineering stack to ensure better search, enabling voice as a medium to interact, and most importantly, expand selection.

In a bid to keep customers hooked on to the platform from a commerce perspective, the company is also launching ‘Flipkart Ideas’, which will work with brands and influencers to produce content on several topics including health, wellness, fitness, cooking, and photography.

Last month, Netflix unveiled its cheapest plan for smartphones and tablets priced at Rs 199 a month. Other players in this space include Zee Entertainment’s ZEE5, Reliance backed ALTBalaji, and Times Internet-owned MX Player.