App-only eCommerce: A bad idea

Flipkart has gone ahead and officially stated, that over the year, it will shut down its desktop and (surely) mobile website and move to an app-only store. They seem to be following the sister concern Myntra's move to go app-only from May 1st, a week from now. If you ask me, they could not have got it more wrong.

Recent data might suggest (I don't have this data, but somebody must have used more than their gut feeling to announce such a move, right?) that there is a tremendous growth for acquisition and conversion on Apps; especially a huge potential in 'Tier II and beyond' bases in India. So true of a country where most people get their first taste of internet freedom via a mobile data plan. But, that is just a part of the picture.

Then, there is the theory that suggests internet will go the 'Push way' and 'supply' information you need like a 'utility' such as water and electricity. OK. Enough said. Then there is the other theory that uses the evolving platform/notification features of recent and upcoming Android and iO/S versions with streaming notifications to weakly support that App is the only way to go.

After its Billion Dollar Sale blunder, Flipkart is likely readying itself for another blunder with its app-only move. Agreed, that are many reasons to have an app for an e-commerce set-up and they are great for several good reasons. But does that mean you do not have a mobile website or desktop website altogether? That's preposterous.

I buy a lot, much to my wife's chagrin (generally, about spending), a lot... online. For many reasons, the purchases are split, chiefly, between Flipkart and Amazon, and to a smaller extent, Snapdeal, eBay, category stores and the likes. Then there are the specialized sites in international locations catering to a national population. I go there too. There is no count of how many times I have used and will use the apps of local cab companies to call a ride across town, Airline tickets, hotel bookings, restaurant reviews, product reviews, movie tickets and a few other things I am forgetting, all have been bought online. But, with the exception of Taxis, that too only in the last few months, I have not used apps exclusively for any type of purchase. For all but Taxis, apps is just the last step for me. I would be a typical if not a champion profile of the current generation of digital consumers. So, may be they should be reading this article and considering my perspective. Here it is:

• I like to research the products that I buy. Mobile App, how much ever passionately you built it, sucks for this purpose. Don't take it personally. It's the same for everyone. I don't even want to talk about how difficult it is to filter and sort products (why restrict the filter and sort options on Apps?). Worse, if I am simply 'exploring' a category for what's new out there. 
• I like the big feel of the pictures. No, pinch zoom is a compromise for me; for those times that I am in a queue at a checkout line or killing time at the airport.
• I go to apps, sure, for making that final step of buying and taking that app-only discount or another incentive you have put out there for me.
• I sign out of apps, after I do the purchase. Sometime, I uninstall a shopping app altogether, just to avoid your excitement of 'offers I should not miss'.
• Push is NOT they way for me. Of the several mailboxes I maintain, my work mailbox is the only one that's on Push or Sync mode. I like to pull down the screen to refresh my mailboxes. That's the way it should be. I choose when I want to see the email. If I expect something critical, I will go there more often. But that true for email and it's true for everything else.
• If you figure out my buying journey and 'attribution' entirely and accurately, you'll see that I will come to your desktop site as many times as I need to know more about the product, the comparisons, the reviews (until more reviews get posted) and shipping policies, wishlist, reading book excerpts etc. I do all this on the Desktop site. I grew up reading newspapers and still read a lot of books (checkout my order history, if you can). But, I don't do all the product related reading in a small screen, simply because I have better choice- the widescreen of the laptop (I am not forgetting that App on a Tab also provides a midway solution).

If you read between the lines, you will see themes of usability, user interface, user experience and traditional convenience of a large screen. Mobile apps might be hep and the key thing for your VC/PE pitches, but for me, all's good as long as you keep your desktop sites live and running. Shut down your desktop site and I will leave in a hurry, because you ignored one segment, the likes of me.


Flipkart, India's homegrown eCommerce bell weather might just go down in the history for the biggest blunder yet (even if they later recover from their big bet), should they decide to shutdown their desktop site. Don't do it.

Mongoose and snake

In the era of bite sized entertainment, 'byte sized' if you bring in the digital angle to it, shortness and sports are related at some level.

"Jesus wept" is the shortest verse in The Bible. The phrase, however, found its way into popular jargon when short skirts found their place in international tennis. The phrase now represents the phenomenon personified by Navratilova and her predecessors, Kournikova, Sherapova and their successors.

At another level of shortness, take cricket for example: from a 5-day-long affair to a day long version to the now as-long-as-a-movie format with T20, innovation in cricket has found for it new fans. Cricket has probably also recovered lost fans.

The information convergence led to competition, for the attention of the consumer, between traditional broadcasting media and the mobile & the Internet as media. And the consumer is increasingly drawn toward personalised entertainment. Anyone who has enjoyed the award winning video feeds on youtube (dispite all the garbage that people upload) and other video feeds can tell you why the Internet offers better quality (measured as better value per unit time?) over TV in general. Don't like NGC or Discovery channel in Hindi? Personalise it into English (or vice versa) with digital DTH. DTH is driven by technology, but consumerism (of it) is mixedly driven by need and affordability.

To apply this logic to sports, I think the race for quality content measured per unit time is another reason why shorter formats of games like cricket will revolutionize the way we consume sports-as-entertainment. You personalise the consumption of sports by chosing the format you like best.

A couple of days back, two new IPL team franchises were sold for almost 150% of the price paid for all eight original franchise teams three years back. It's like saying 'two for the price of ten'. Franchise owners know that the IPL wave has only touched the shores of Tier II cities. There is a lot of cricket ground waiting to be covered.

Talking of shortness, the quintessential cricket bat has become shorter!!! "Mongoose" is deemed to become the latest innovation in cricket. Named eponymously for the animal's ferocity, the new bat is 44% shorter on the body, compensated in weight by thickness and in length by a longer handle. Like one cricket commentator was saying, the bat in Mathew Hayden's hands looks more like a club than a bat. And clobbering Hayden did demonstrate a couple of matches ago. Mongoose helped run the meter fast!

If the the five day version of the game is the snake and the T20 version the Mongoose, who will win this match? The match, you can bet, will be much longer than an evening with IPL.

Recalling brand stories

Brands are like friends, good friends are honest and don't let friends down. This is, in brief, one of the points that Professor Abraham Koshy (
Read Profile ) made in his recent article on ET(Read Here).

Maruti-Suzuki A-Star's is an apt caselet for brand crisis prevention. Maruti-Suzuki's major, even if not the first, recall highlights the sea change in how Indian producers treat their consumers.

But when did Indian brands, let's say specifically, Indian automobile brands become good friends of the consumer?

One of the key effects of our open market economy in automobile industry is that Indian players are no more taking consumers for granted. Faced with powerful peers who are quality conscious, responsible and honest, Indian producers have learned that for them "it 's the right way, or the highway". It was also probably the oft blamed Indian 'chalta hai' attitude coupled with the existence of seller's market for a long time, that had led to manufacturers' propensity to ignore issues that bothered consumers.

In 1999, I purchased Enfield's first aluminium-engine bike called Machismo A350. The bike suffered from noisy valves that chattered wildly. But Enfield did nothing despite complaints and the bike failed miserably. New avatars of the bike emerged a couple of years later, but many were left holding lemons.

Then, take for example, Bajaj Chetak's famous 'tilting of the scooter' trick. Unless the scooter was tilted at a difficult angle, known only to an owner, the fuel wouldn't start flowing. I remember seeing this growing up in the '80s, when scooters ruled, as well as in the mid 2000s, when aerodynamic bikes whizzed past the humble scooter. Everyone knew it was a fuel problem (you did not see it in other scooters, by the way). But Bajaj did nothing, apparently, to fix the problem for 20 odd years. I guess after some time the tilting became an ownership statement, a romantic one at that. And Bajaj could probably get away because of the strong heritage value. A Bajaj scooter offered mass consumer value on which India rode for a few generations.

But at some point in time between the 90s and early 2000s two things overtook the Bajaj scooter phenomenon. First, were the Bajaj bikes, which themselves were a response to the flood of 100 cc bikes that, to name the pioneers, Hero Honda and TVS Suzukis had caused. The second was the shifting consumer preference. Who cared for a technologically stagnant product when there were so many options available? Pick up any auto magazine and see how many pages the bikes table, already written in small sized font, runs into. So, is this one of the reasons why the Bajaj scooter was put to rest?

Today, however, it is the buyer's market. Consumerism, aided by information-empowerment in the background of open competition has helped clean up the manufacturer's act and enabled consumer to 'unfriend' the brands she cannot trust.