Category: Apps

Exclusively mobile strategy to be launched by Flipkart

| May 12, 2015

By the end of the year, the m-commerce company intends to transition its operations entirely to smartphones and tablets.

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock to many people that Flipkart has had an exclusively mobile strategy up their sleeve for some time now, but what has come as a surprise is that it looks like these intentions are already underway.

The company has started to prepare to move entirely over to the mobile commerce side, stepping off the standard web.

A new report has been making its rounds of the media and has indicated that Flipkart will be constructing an entirely mobile strategy based on a new application platform. In this way, they intend to provide consumers with a shopping experience that more closely mirrors that of the real world. What has not yet been revealed is exactly how the m-commerce company intends to actually accomplish that goal. That said, it has been shifting a considerable amount of its engineering and infrastructure resources over to the pursuit of that goal.

Their mobile strategy appears to be a novel one and is one that will turn its current app entirely on its head.

Mobile StrategyThe mobile apps from Flipkart are already known for providing an extremely user and consumer friendly experience. That said, the company appears to feel that it can improve that experience even further by adding a more realistic approach to mobile commerce.

Flipkart’s chief product officer, Punit Soni, explained that the company feels that the current mcommerce apps are highly influenced by the PC environment. For that reason, in order to enhance shopping in a way that is more true to real life, the applications need to be completely overhauled. The purpose is to create an application that has been designed for mobile from the ground up, without falling back onto established concepts from the desktop ecosystem.

The new mobile strategy will also rely quite heavily on social concepts, as it will allow people to be able to browse for products and obtain recommendations from friends. In fact, it may even allow several people to shop “together” online through the upcoming m-commerce app platform.

Walgreens implements mobile apps to enhance shopping experience

| May 11, 2015

The pharmacy chain has decided to boost its in-store offerings through the use of a customer’s own smartphone.

Now that about three quarters of all adults in the United States have smartphones, Walgreens has decided that this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up and it has now added mobile apps to its shopping experience in order to make sure that it is as easy and convenient as possible.

Three out of every four people in the U.S. also have a Walgreens within five miles of where they live.

This means that most people have both a smartphone and a local Walgreens, making mobile apps an ideal opportunity to reach out to customers and improve their experience in-store. By doing this, the chain is also hoping that it will encourage people to buy more, while they’re there. The idea has to do with providing the ultimate in convenience. This smartphone application makes it possible to conduct searches for products in the store, to learn more about what they’re seeing in front of them with connected devices, and even to obtain savings opportunities with digital coupons.

The mobile apps also allow customers to fill their prescriptions with a few taps of their smartphones.

Mobile Apps - WalgreensAt the time that this article was written, Walgreens had not revealed how many users its smartphone app actually had, but the application continually finds itself among the top 10 lifestyle apps within the Google Play and iOS stores.

According to the Walgreens director of digital commerce product management, Adam Crouch, “Offline and online have blurred in the minds of consumers, so almost everything we do digitally ties back to stores in some way.” He went on to add that “We’re figuring out how to use digital to take convenience to the next level.”

The pharmacy chain now has a team that is dedicated to rebuilding the company based on a kind of “digital DNA,” said Crouch, who also pointed out that the company’s primary focus is on customer convenience. By putting a digital strategy into place, it helps to make sure that Walgreens will be more flexible and capable of adapting to the latest consumer behavior and expectation trends, particularly when it comes to the shape of its mobile app.