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India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

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Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#61

Post by signal11 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #2

Unreal. Do they really expect it to cost more to maintain their web presence in addition to their mobile app than their web presence will make them? If you already have a back-end for servicing all of those mobile apps, is having an HTML front-end really that difficult? I vastly prefer doing almost anything I can think of on a real desktop with big displays and a good keyboard over a mobile app. Am I that out of touc…

One issue with phones in emerging markets is that they are very storage constrained -- the cheaper models often sell with as little as 2GB of storage. On Android, you can add more storage with SD cards, but some apps (Facebook & Chrome, iirc?) cannot be moved to the SD Card. People with limited storage often have to be quite brutal in triaging their installed apps list. Maybe Flipkart has data that shows that users often install their app, but I think a few quarters of anemic mobile user growth will help them change their mind.

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#62

Post by kazagistar »

winter_blue wrote: post #55
hobarrera wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already past time that Android had (out-of-the-box) a "don't grant access but make the application think I did"-checkbox. Essentially, showing fake data to the app if you pick this (eg: no photos, fake contacts, etc). AFAIK, there are some android apps (and cyanogen) that add this features, but it really needs to be worked on upstream. This is doubly useful for google, since they can always keep their own apps a…

It'll be better if there are checkboxes next to each permission, and if the user doesn't grant a certain permission, the app can know . Older apps targeting older API levels will receive fake data, whereas newer apps will be able to know whether they were actually granted the permission or not. This would prevent apps (and app developers) from being left in the dark, and would also kill the "all or nothing" permissio…

"Sorry, but please reenable GPS so SuperFlashlight can function."

Nah.

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#63

Post by rathish_g »

Note: They are not closing the flipkart online portal, but they are closing the myntra website which they acquired an year ago. And in the press release they must have mentioned that they are moving completely to mobile version.

They bought myntra because of tough competition and have to close it anyway. They are doing an experiment by keeping the mobile version.

Slow death for Myntra! PR for Flipkart mobile app!

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#64

Post by thewhitetulip »

winter_blue wrote: post #55
hobarrera wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already past time that Android had (out-of-the-box) a "don't grant access but make the application think I did"-checkbox. Essentially, showing fake data to the app if you pick this (eg: no photos, fake contacts, etc). AFAIK, there are some android apps (and cyanogen) that add this features, but it really needs to be worked on upstream. This is doubly useful for google, since they can always keep their own apps a…

It'll be better if there are checkboxes next to each permission, and if the user doesn't grant a certain permission, the app can know . Older apps targeting older API levels will receive fake data, whereas newer apps will be able to know whether they were actually granted the permission or not. This would prevent apps (and app developers) from being left in the dark, and would also kill the "all or nothing" permissio…

Android starting from 4.4 does have a privacy feature that allows you to control what data out of permissions a particular app can access, on my phone I have turned everything off for everything. P.S. I don't have any google app

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#65

Post by thewhitetulip »

captn3m0 wrote: post #45
crdb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason I haven't seen mentioned yet is that countries like India can be overwhelmingly mobile-dominated (as in, few people own desktops). I never had data on India but in places like the Philippines or Indonesia (with similar GDP/capita), your buyer's only internet access might come from his (very basic) smartphone and I sometimes saw > 90% mobile visits. At a previous company, we saw our Indonesian traffic soar…

The issue here is that Flipkart is not poor. It is one of the largest private companies in India, with valuations at $11 billion. They have already spun off their costlier operations (such as courier and warehousing) into separate companies which they have since sold off. The only thing flipkart is doing right now is tech and sales. They are definitely not "limited" by money or IT resources.

They might be valued highly, but they aren't having strong revenue streams, they still make 2.4Rs loss per 1Re revenue, hardly profitable.

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#66

Post by thewhitetulip »

I think they are making a mistake, there is a reason why the internet was created, and forcefully migrating all users to the mobile app is wrong, it defeats the purpose of having a website which anyone can handle, the news might be that flipkart is shutting down its mobile website, shutting down the main website is like shooting yourself with a pistol :D

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#68

Post by untog »

hobarrera wrote: post #48
hiby007 wrote: post #14

I am an regular Flipkart User, and I do not like this behaviour, Flipkart is forcing me to move to an mobile app, just to have better control and tracking. They have already stopped supporting the mobile website, and it simply instructs you to download the app to continue. This is the moment I have completely stopped using flipkart and moved to amazon.in I like website more than app, both gets the job done, where as…

It's already past time that Android had (out-of-the-box) a "don't grant access but make the application think I did"-checkbox. Essentially, showing fake data to the app if you pick this (eg: no photos, fake contacts, etc). AFAIK, there are some android apps (and cyanogen) that add this features, but it really needs to be worked on upstream. This is doubly useful for google, since they can always keep their own apps a…

* It's already past time that Android had (out-of-the-box) a "don't grant access but make the application think I did"-checkbox.*

The weird thing is, it does. Or, rather, it's hidden-in-the-box. There's an app called App Ops that can be enabled if you have root access that limits permissions to installed apps - I'm actually not sure if it sends fake data instead but I'm yet to have an app crash from it. But without root it's not usable. Sigh.

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#69

Post by brianbreslin »

godzilla82 wrote: post #56
brianbreslin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means mobile service provider (airtel, vodafone, at&t, etc)

Oh, I thought he meant the App or the Play store.. Isnt that how in app purchases work?

In some countries there are agreements for carrier billing instead of credit cards and it deducts from a users' prepaid balances.

Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile

#70

Post by crdb »

captn3m0 wrote: post #45
crdb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason I haven't seen mentioned yet is that countries like India can be overwhelmingly mobile-dominated (as in, few people own desktops). I never had data on India but in places like the Philippines or Indonesia (with similar GDP/capita), your buyer's only internet access might come from his (very basic) smartphone and I sometimes saw > 90% mobile visits. At a previous company, we saw our Indonesian traffic soar…

The issue here is that Flipkart is not poor. It is one of the largest private companies in India, with valuations at $11 billion. They have already spun off their costlier operations (such as courier and warehousing) into separate companies which they have since sold off. The only thing flipkart is doing right now is tech and sales. They are definitely not "limited" by money or IT resources.

You'd be amazed how money can be wasted in online retail. I know of a 2,000 employee company that took 1.5 years to produce a mobile version of its site and another year for the app. Another (also thousands of employees and over 500 developers to manage code bloat) hires a "Chief Data Scientist" to build a data science team every 6 months or so - the guy quits after 3 months without even getting access to a database, and a few months later the CEO asks the CTO how that data science effort is going and they put a job ad out again. I think they parallelized the effort and hired three in one go last round to speed up finding one that will stick...

These companies have in common that they hired "cheap and many" rather than "expensive and few" initially to lower their startup costs and "tech risk", and that they are run by former bankers and McKinseys who consider tech "below them", something that is "commoditized" and can just be "bought in".

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