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

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

myntra.myntassets.com

43 pointszuron746 comments

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, who now won't access myntra.

Indian e-commerce space is evolving, and with so many players in the field, the ultimate user would explore all the other options before committing to a purchase (unless they are extremely loyal to myntra), and now it seems to me that with the platform restricted to mobile/tab application, myntra has made a huge mistake.

But it would be interesting to see how this pans out.

>I don't understand the point in shutting down the website.

Pretty sure this is some marketing gimmick to get them in the news and get people exposed to the brand who haven't been before (hey, it worked!). The fashion industry is fairly terrible on all fronts. They'll go back after this gimmick is over.

Didn't Taco Bell do this recently? They temporarily shutdown their websites and launched the app. It got them a lot of attention and press.

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.

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.

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.

They don't make these decisions lightly. They have done the market research and must have deemed it an acceptable loss to lose these desktop people.

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.

IMO, this is not just to discourage/avoid the price comparison issue but to mainly circumvent the competition in more of the web/SEO way.

Every e-commerce website right now is putting way too much money on PPC to make sure their site pops up for any product you search online.

What flipkart/myntra wants to achieve is this; you think of a particular shoe you want to buy. Instead of firing up your browser and see other others offers from ebay or amazon or snapdeal, they expect you to go to myntra app, search for it and buy it.

Pulling the desktop site means no such comparison nor any other offers would be shown to you instead you would get it from the app.

I am totally against this not just because this sounds stupid to me but kills our freedom of choice. I and you are smart and patient enough to browse around but not many new smartpone users would be and might just buy it from Myntra no matter the price. Especially if Myntra starts coming pre-installed on devices ( which I think would be their next move )

This makes sense. Another thing I noticed is that once an app is installed on your phone, it acts like an always present advert. In other words, apps are now the equivalent of having an "icon on the desktop" in the old world. I really suspect that the reason they're doing this is not because discovery through the app is great, but because repeat purchases through the app is great. That would be a good reason to throw marketing money at "install our app and get this coupon" schemes.

Ah, this makes total sense now. The SEO thing is what made them ditch the desktop version.

Hope that this Searching becomes as easy on phones as it is on desktop and nullify their smartness :)

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. And I get it why they are doing this but they fail to realise ( I am talking out of my depth maybe ) that eventually when they want to make money and the offers are normal/stopped people would not necessarily use the mobile app. Myntra alternatives are many in India.

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.

Agreed. The only reason I have ever downloaded and used a mobile app for ordering anything was for the mobile-only offer.

an theory I read was, forcing users to use an app gives better monopoly. users can't drift off to other sites to compare deals; apps will monitor you and study behaviour, and help their marketing strategy; they bug you with deals all the time making you use the app more often than you'd have otherwise( idea from Facebook); flipkart n Amazon did this with the mobile site, flipkart is testing the waters of the next stage by using it's myntra division.

hurmm I really dont understand this, How much it would cost for these multimillion dollar companies to maintain a desktop version!?

To my limited knowledge this is only an effort on client side as the apis to interact on server would be the same be it desktop or mobile.

I have doubts about the data that 95% of the traffic is now through app. Lots of people, including myself, do shopping through desktop only. Its too cumbersome to flick through so many items on mobile!

additional comment :

this is purely a fashion e-commerce portal , I generally want to look at the images of the clothes in good quality on a bigger screen before I buy. I don't think I can get a good overview of the apparel even from my S5 .

I wonder how hard would it be to reverse-engineer the APIs used by the app and put out a web site using them.

I also wonder how hard would it be for Myntra to create a basic web site using their own app's APIs.

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.

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.

It's not quiet the same, people were going from theater towards home video. In India, people are going mobile-first. So in effect, it's reversed.

The problem with mobile-first is that it doesn't show that people have moved on from computing. It shows that these people aren't yet exposed to computing. In next 10 years, as 20% more Indians move to middle class, they will need to use some form of computing to conduct their livelihoods, just like the rest of us.

I get your logic, but this is like Flipkart investing 100% in mobile video because 95% revenue is coming from there today, and most Indians can't yet afford a TV. But this totally negates the fact that in next 10 years, the growth in number of people buying TV would be 10 times the current market of Flipkart.

Either Flipkart is using Myntra to test the waters.

Or their investors have some goal to become profitable ASAP http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/myntra-ai...

I guess the call was to become profitable no matter what. And if it comes at the cost of shaving off a bit of the Topline (Desktop Revs), then so be it!

Not one Indian model on that website.

Not every Indian user has access to smartphone at all times, in majority of cases people buy stuff while doing other stuff online, maybe from home or office, those people won't be able to buy anything.

second of all there is nothing called as brand loyalty in ecommerce, the website offering cheapest deals wins, I used to buy many books from flipkart because they give good deals on books, but while buying other stuff I check every other major e commerce website.

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.

WTH! Either start as Mobile only app and be successfull (Eg: Whatsapp) (or) Start a Website and gradually introduce mobile apps (Eg: Google) (or) Start a retail service, use website as entry point, then introduce mobile apps (Eg: Amazon)

Myntra model is backwards. Start retail, use desktop website, start mobile site, think about mobile app, hate desktops, shutdown desktop website, shutdown mobile site.

I don't get it!!

I question the wisdom of WhatsApp's move anyway. It seems like the vast majority of my communications suddenly moved to Facebook messenger, in part because it's right there in the desktop website.

There are some advantages of going mobile only

1. Sending deals to customers directly. (Push notifications) Increases customer loyalty.

2. Harder to compare things on mobile, compared with Web. It easier to compare things on web. Good for myntra.

3. Competitors can scrape off a website easily to create competing deals.

4. As you mentioned less dependence on google. All the money spent on SEO and can be spent somewhere else.

5. Money saved from maintaining the website.

I think Myntra went too far by shutting the website down. Normally a site transitioning from web to mobile doesn't make all the features available on mobile(you don't want to make the users suffer) and looks like they are trying to pull of a zuckerberg (when he made the Facebook employees use only mobile with no access to the web internally.) albeit on a bigger scale.

any one wanna bet they will re-enable the website access after a while ?

On the other hand, thinking about the possibility of every website starting to have its own app we have to install is scary.

90's return, but with Android and iOS apps instead of Windows clients written in Delphi and Visual Basic.

This sounds like what Peter Thiel mentions in monopoly chapter in his book. A restaurant marketing itself as south indian food place, and ignoring the fact that they still have to compete with that pizza place next door.

It seems we can soon expects the closing date for Myntra. Its not a good move.

Also only 70% of your sales coming through mobile leaves a big minority that are not. Can they even afford to remove 30% of their revenue potentially? Is maintaining a website really costing that much?

So stupid. Taco Bell tried it and fairly quickly realized how stupid it was.

At least Taco Bell was the exclusive way to get your Taco Bell fix. Myntra is just an e-tailer, and many of their products you can get elsewhere. So it makes even _less_ sense than Taco Bell's move.

Interestingly, you can still access Myntra's non-frontpage: http://www.myntra.com/women

I guess you didn't even try to open http://www.myntra.com

When you check their site from a phone, it says changes will be active from 15th May.

I don't get it, just as I don't get why all those chat apps (BBM, KiK, WhatsApp) refuse to create a desktop client on similar philosophical grounds.

This will not end well.

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