Punit Soni, the Chief Product Officer at Flipkart demonstrated the Ping chat app that was launched on Tuesday. Flipkart is trying to make its mobile app only shopping a fun filled and enriching experience with this app. This is evident by the features that the app is loaded with and these are on the company’s roadmap as well.
Soni stated that it is a fun experience to shop in real life terms. Basically, you can share with and show your friends before you buy anything. So far, online shopping was an isolated experience as people use their mobile or desktop to do it. He stated that with this chat feature, Flipkart is trying to follow social shopping.
The Ping app has an invite-only feature has boosted the size of the application by about 2 MB. Once it is stable, the feature will be made available to all the users.
This move by Flipkart to focus on the mobile app user experience is a determined by a shift in its user base to the mobile devices. Almost 70 percent of the users access the e-commerce portal through mobile and this was only 20 percent in the last year. Notably, Flipkart is not the only one that is trying to utilize the possibilities in the mobile space. Even Snapdeal launched Shopo, a mobile app marketplace letting users to directly chat with the sellers and vice versa via a messenger on mobile.
Regarding the same, Kunal Bahl, the CEO of Snapdeal stated that mobile is the key factor that is fueling the e-commerce growth. Also, Paytm is prepping to launch a messenger app in three months. The mobile payment service provider’s CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma stated that they will add features of all the other social networks. He also claimed that some card based infrastructure is in the works and that users can share the deals via it.
In the country, 40 percent of the online e-commerce is predicted to happen via mobile. In comparison, the same is below 20 percent in the United States.
Flipkart has claimed that none of the other online firms across the world were creating apps such as Ping that has deep linking technology. This app has been developed by a team of 30 members from Bengaluru in around nine months.
The Head of Engineering at Flipkart, Peeyush Ranjan stated that with Ping, the conversations are saved in the invite, and that this is impossible with the other apps.
