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
#2Unreal. 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 touch? Why would anyone, that has a choice in the matter, prefer a mobile app for shopping, when it's much easier to open and manage dozens of tabs of product listings and reviews across lots of different sites for ease of price comparison and product comparison?
... wait, I think I realized why they're doing this. They want to create a walled marketplace where you're locked in to buying things from them, and can't easily compare products or prices elsewhere.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#3I imagine they will still have a website, just not one that has the functionality. It makes perfect sense, if a particular interface is only driving single digit usage you drop it. No need to waste dollars updating something no one uses.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#4There was a very good blog post about why shutting down the website makes a lot of sense in India (and many parts of the world).
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#5If they really turn off their website entirely, they'd get no traffic from search engines. I assume this means they'll either keep product pages up for the robots (and then redirect you to the mobile app), or that their 40M registered users simply go directly to Flipkart when they want to buy something.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#6This is crazy. It used to be that companies who couldn't do both mobile and desktop just made an app wrap their website. Maybe we need the reverse of a WebView. A website that does nothing more than emulate an app.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#7A mobile app can have a higher conversion factor than a website. But still this decision seems to be short sighted. A well-designed website allows people the access information from a wide variety of devices - Amazon e-readers, Google Android, iOS, Blackberry, linux terminals. If your device platform is not supported then Flipkart then you will have to select a competitor website.
If you do not want to agree with the many "Allow this app to access X, Y, and Z" then you will have to select a competitor website.
If you want to use a bigger screen and a keyboard then you will have to select a competitor website.
A bug on website can be fixed immediately. If app has a bug and updated fix is stuck in the app review process then you will have to select a competitor website.
A company such as Flipkart can definitely support a web version along with apps. And aren't website and apps supposed to be simple frontends using the same backend APIs?
I think Flipkart is being too much ahead of time by ditching the web. Hopefully, competitors such as Amazon and Snapdeal will fill the gap left by Flipkart.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#8This is crazy. It used to be that companies who couldn't do both mobile and desktop just made an app wrap their website. Maybe we need the reverse of a WebView. A website that does nothing more than emulate an app.
It actually already exists: https://www.manymo.com/
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#9Unreal. 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…
What about Gopher? FTP? Usenet? AOL? WAP? HTTP/HTML is just another way of consuming the content, but the justification for using it over other mediums is that usage is high enough. If it falls below a certain threshold, then it makes sense to throw it out, just like the other low-performing mediums. Although walled-garden reasoning may also play a factor, a simple market-driven analysis would be sufficient in many cases to warrant the decision to drop HTML.
There are some big social media companies whose mobile traffic so far outstrips their web-usage, that they consider from time to time dropping the html frontend. It seems inconceivable to us, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
Re: India’s Flipkart to shut down website, thanks to popularity of mobile
#10Unreal. 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…
> 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 touch?
Yes I'm afraid you are. Worth watching Luke Wroblewski talking about Mobile at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-FMTPsgy_Y ... some graphs near the start help make this clear.