App-only e-commerce may dominate market

Monday, July 13, 2015 - 14:13 by David Aiken

A significant shift in the way that e-commerce companies operate could be underway. Last week, a prominent retailer based in India announced that it was getting rid of its traditional websites and, instead, switching to making sales only through mobile apps, according to the Financial Times.

This approach may, of course, be better suited to a country like India, where the infrastructure for connectivity is better suited to mobiles than it is fixed line internet access. But the suggestion that e-commerce sites may be on the way out, as mobiles lead the way for safe shopping online, is one that could have an impact in the UK.

The now app-only retailer is called Flipkart and although it is technically classed as a start-up, it is still India’s biggest online retailer, accounting for more sales than any of its rivals in the past 12 months.

The decision to ditch its desktop and mobile sites altogether may seem startling, but given that hundreds of millions of Indian consumers are expected to get online via smartphones in the next few years, it is strategically savvy.

In the UK, people are far more accustomed to carrying out safe shopping online from desktop PCs and laptops over a home broadband connection. And the maturity of the e-commerce market here means that even the use of smartphones for shopping is taking time to turn people away from traditional avenues for retail.

It may eventually be that businesses in the UK follow Flipkart by switching to an app-only approach to e-commerce, but this will probably be practical for a small group of retailers, that find the majority of their online traffic comes from apps rather than a website.

Companies like Domino’s Pizza have already seen mobile users account for the bulk of orders and it may not be long before others are reporting similar trends.