Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

myntra.myntassets.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#31

Post by arihant »

I think they are overvaluing brand loyalty here. I don't even understand people who can shop using mobile apps, especially clothes. You cannot easily compare, read reviews, get a gist of product or compare with other websites before buying. If Myntra goes with this, it would just fall off my list of sites I go to for clothes.

Yes, I buy on Myntra app. That's because they give discounts on it which are app-only. But I simply cannot put myself through horror of clothes browsing on a mobile phone. Thanks, but no thanks.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#32

Post by pranayairan »

vidyesh wrote: post #15
achow wrote: post #13

Data makes the move look compelling.. "From Zero users a year ago, currently about 95% of Myntra’s traffic is being channeled through its mobile app. Mobile accounts for 70% of its total revenues.. Of the total time Indians spend on the internet, 90% is through mobile phones." http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2015/05/12/in-global-...

Actually most articles and even Myntra itself is missing one big variable which has caused this '95%' mobile traffic. The mobile only offers. I myself have fallen to those offers, downloaded the App, used the mobile-only offers and bought items. But when no such offer is provided I prefer browsing and buying from the desktop site. For the past few months Myntra and Flipkart have been running such mobile-only offers.…

Completely agree, pushing app only offer is key reason people using there app. It is crazy, u promote app everywhere, give heavy app discounts and then say 95% traffic is from app. The main reason i think is notifications, they can bug users even if they don't want to see the offer, this way they will be retaining more users. I get a offer notification every day.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#33

Post by mkagenius »

arihant wrote: post #31

I think they are overvaluing brand loyalty here. I don't even understand people who can shop using mobile apps, especially clothes. You cannot easily compare, read reviews, get a gist of product or compare with other websites before buying. If Myntra goes with this, it would just fall off my list of sites I go to for clothes. Yes, I buy on Myntra app. That's because they give discounts on it which are app-only. But I…

People thought who would watch movies at home. Now people do that on 3.5 inch phone.

Maybe its not impossible. Just a thought.

So, it can be a experiment to see how it goes with myntra and then do that with flipkart too.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#34

Post by prateek_mir »

general_failure wrote: post #17
prateek_mir wrote: post #5

I don't understand the point in shutting down the website. There's a large audience in India which browses for products on e-commerce website while casually browsing other stuff. Taking the service entirely to an app based platform isolates a lot of such customers. Another point is that the there is a section of audience which doesn't necessarily use smart phones, or won't use smart phones for making such purchases,…

I think the data belies your assumptions (see achow's post)

We'll, my assumptions are based on what I have observed personally, and that is, a lot of students and college going kids living in hostels use conventional browser based web-apps.

Everyone wants to compare prices before making any purchase, and with this, what you'll have is on one hand a bunch of websites that one can view in a browser tab, and on the other, a dedicated app which one has to put extra effort to navigate to.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#35

Post by prateek_mir »

nine_k wrote: post #18
prateek_mir wrote: post #5

I don't understand the point in shutting down the website. There's a large audience in India which browses for products on e-commerce website while casually browsing other stuff. Taking the service entirely to an app based platform isolates a lot of such customers. Another point is that the there is a section of audience which doesn't necessarily use smart phones, or won't use smart phones for making such purchases,…

I can suppose that keeping the web site up to date costs significant resources, while channeling only a small percent of sales. Not having web presence at all is strange, though. Possibly they'll shut down the e-commerce web site, just leaving a static site with contacts and the links to the mobile apps.

I am not well versed with the costs of keeping such a site up, but a scaled down version can be always be maintained using S/IaaS solutions.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#36

Post by drvortex »

hiphopyo wrote: post #10
jitix wrote: post #2

Very bad decision. Myntra's parent Flipkart is also pushing for something similar. Not every user in India has a smartphone to use apps. They will be losing a lot of customers (like my mom, aunt, grandpa, etc) who can use websites but don't use smartphones.

Isn't Firefox OS with their mobile web platform about to flood into India as well? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519336

Huh? Why India? The link talks about Africa. The Indian mobile market has been completely taken over by Android. About 50% of molbile phones sold in India are cheap Chinese phones. But even those these days come with 1Ghz processors and 4 inch screens (albeit of poor quality).

These run Android fine. Firefox OS is at the moment clearly heading for the no-mobile-phones-yet market and offering a low-end phone. India is somewhere in the mostly-mid-range-mobile-phones zone now.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#37

Post by captn3m0 »

The last time we were discussing this on HN (wrt Flipkart's announcement), someone posted that this was about walled gardens, which I find to be a compelling argument. It is far more harder to do price comparisons, and look for same items across websites on a mobile device (switching between apps, copy-paste, no extensions).

If retailers can force their customers to mobile-shopping, they retain customers and reduce chances of being second-guessed at prices. There are a lot of Chrome Extensions that do price comparisons and people often cross-browse for the same products looking for discounts. Going mobile-only will discourage this behavior.

Re: Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only

#39

Post by theFifthHead »

It might have something to do with their positioning as a m-commerce than an e-commerce where amazon is already a global leader and the way things have been going sooner or later flipkart will have to give up the coveted #1 spot. However if they transition into a mobile only commerce they can create hype (illusory but nonetheless) about being a market leader and innovator in their category and attract further investment or an IPO down the line.
Post reply on HN