Flipkart planning to shut down the website

Flipkart is planning to shut down its website and move to an app-only format within a year. A year back, only 6% of Flipkart’s traffic used to come from mobile but within 18 months it has increased. The significant change in traffic has highlighted the importance of mobile for the consumers.

The Bansal’s run portal has more than 40 mn registered users and has about 30,000 merchants selling over 20 mn products on the platform. It does about 8 mn shipments a month, and two-thirds of its online traffic comes from users in small cities and towns.

Flipkart’s app-only direction assumes significance in places where most people don’t own desktop computers and have limited access to broadband. Smartphones are now affordable and about 6-7 mn of them are brought into India for local sale. Going by the numbers, an app’s consumer reach will be larger than the mobile version of a website or the website itself.