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Pratishtha Maharaj, a Bengaluru homemaker, had difficulty last week trying to buy clothes from Flipkart. "I could not open the website on the browser of my phone. I was asked to download the app. But due to low storage on my phone, I could not," she said, adding, "I bought a similar product from Amazon.in's website."
With traffic from mobile devices on the rise, e-commerce companies are pushing users to download apps by offering app-only discounts or discontinuing mobile phone websites.They want a grip on spending and better mining of customer data, but experts said an app-only strategy might not be the best.
Indian e-commerce is ahead of China and the US in sales from mobile phones and apps. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, receives a little over 30 per cent of its gross merchandise value from mobile phones and apps. The majority of Indian e-commerce companies report over 60 per cent sales on non-desktop platforms.
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The principal reason is India's slow broadband network and shallow penetration of internet broadband. Smartphones have pushed up data use, raising e-commerce sales in smaller towns.
"All companies are working on a seamless app experience. As much as 80-90 per cent of sales could come from mobile apps," said the chief executive officer of a fashion e-tailer.
"E-commerce companies must have a multi-channel strategy because there are several challenges while shopping from an app," said Vishal Tripathi, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Not all users have tablets, and the screen size of a mobile phone is too small to offer a rich shopping experience. A large number of people browse on apps but buy on websites," he added. The size of e-commerce apps is 20-40 MB, while the memory on entry-level smartphones is 4-12 GB. According to users, an entry-level smartphone can hold around 12-15 apps of 30-80 MB.
Mobile internet users in India are estimated at 120 million against 100 million using internet on their computers.
Fashion retailer Myntra has an app-only strategy, which may become effective on May 1, 2015. A Myntra spokesperson, however, said it was a long-term strategy. The company receives 90 per cent of its traffic from mobile phones.
"Even though most of our new users are using mobile devices, we have a fair number of visitors using computers," said Rohit Bansal, co-founder and chief operating officer of online marketplace Snapdeal. "We will not have an app-only strategy because we do not want to upset users who access our website from computers," he added.
