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

I don&#x27;t understand the point in shutting down the website. There&#x27;s a large audience in India which browses for products on e-commerce website while casually browsing other stuff. Taking the service <i>entirely</i> to an app based platform isolates a lot of such customers.<p>Another point is that the there is a section of audience which doesn&#x27;t necessarily use smart phones, or won&#x27;t use smart phones for making such purchases, who now won&#x27;t access myntra.<p>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&#x2F;tab application, myntra has made a huge mistake.<p>But it would be interesting to see how this pans out.

Very bad decision. Myntra&#x27;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&#x27;t use smartphones.

The last time we were discussing this on HN (wrt Flipkart&#x27;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).<p>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.

Data makes the move look compelling..<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;saritharai&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;in-global-first-indias-largest-fashion-portal-myntra-ditches-website-goes-mobile-only&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;saritharai&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;in-global-...</a>

an theory I read was, forcing users to use an app gives better monopoly. users can&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s myntra division.

hurmm I really dont understand this, How much it would cost for these multimillion dollar companies to maintain a desktop version!?<p>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 :<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I also wonder how hard would it be for Myntra to create a basic web site using their own app&#x27;s APIs.

I think they are overvaluing brand loyalty here. I don&#x27;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.<p>Yes, I buy on Myntra app. That&#x27;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.

Either Flipkart is using Myntra to test the waters.<p>Or their investors have some goal to become profitable ASAP <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-standard.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;companies&#x2F;myntra-aims-to-become-indias-first-profitable-e-tailer-115051201309_1.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-standard.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;companies&#x2F;myntra-ai...</a><p>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&#x27;t be able to buy anything.<p>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)<p>Myntra model is backwards. Start retail, use desktop website, start mobile site, think about mobile app, hate desktops, shutdown desktop website, shutdown mobile site.<p>I don&#x27;t get it!!

There are some advantages of going mobile only<p>1. Sending deals to customers directly. (Push notifications) Increases customer loyalty.<p>2. Harder to compare things on mobile, compared with Web. It easier to compare things on web. Good for myntra.<p>3. Competitors can scrape off a website easily to create competing deals.<p>4. As you mentioned less dependence on google. All the money spent on SEO and can be spent somewhere else.<p>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&#x27;t make all the features available on mobile(you don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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

I don&#x27;t get it, just as I don&#x27;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.