A few days back IOS covered the news of Flipkart’s intention to go app-only in a year akin to Myntra. Keeping up with that resolution, the ecommerce company has revealed their next move to steadily pull out advertisements from their desktop site and direct them to their mobile platform in the next three months.
Nearly 75% of Flipkart’s traffic comes from their app. The number is huge and opens up a window to become an app-only ecommerce venture. It will also reduce their costs significantly, which is why etailers favour apps over maintaining desktop sites.
So the basic idea is to move all their customers to the Flipkart App in phases, so that they can shut down their website permanently. The shift of advertisements from web portal to mobile app will also create a shift in marketing activities and less reliance on Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. for marketing.
If we look at the figures, less than 5% of Flipkart’s sales are created from ads, which isn’t high. But the company intends to assertively build the ads business and make it work. Some advertisers are happy with this move and don’t mind directing ad spends towards the Flipkart App. Like Cleartrip’s Chief Marketing Officer, Subramanya Sharma, who said, “As a mobile company, we at Cleartrip are always looking for quality mobile inventory, and Flipkart’s mobile app serves as a great platform for us to advertise.”
But some are not. On the condition of anonymity, two electronic makers that advertise on Flipkart said they would oppose such a move by the online retailer.
Recently, Google has introduced a new change in their search engine recommendation on smartphones. It will favour those websites and make them appear in top results that Google regard as ‘mobile-friendly.’ Twist in the tale is Flipkart and Paytm doesn’t qualify in this. And since major traffic on the ecommerce giant comes from mobile, this can severely hamper their business. However they can still get visibility as mobile-friendliness is just one of the many criteria.
Flipkart’s first big move to become app-only etailer was to shut the mobile website, followed by Myntra. This had drawn mixed reactions. It will be interesting to see if phasing out desktop ads and moving it to mobile platform brings positive results.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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