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.
The 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.
SingTel and Standard Chartered Bank launch new mobile platform called Dash
SingTel, a leading telecommunications company in Singapore, has partnered with Standard Chartered Bank in order to launch a new mobile commerce platform. The platform is comprised of three services that are offered by SingTel and Standard Chartered Bank. These services are designed specifically for smartphones and cover money transfers, retail payments, mobile travel insurance, and loan applications. Those with smartphones will be able to use the new platform, which is called Dash, and the platform will not be exclusive to SingTel customers.
Dash could be supported by more than 20,000 merchants throughout Singapore by year’s end
There are already several thousand retail groups that support Dash and SingTel expects that some 20,000 merchants throughout Singapore will be working with the platform by the end of this year. Money transfers between consumers is expected to be the most popular use of the platform, as the demand for money transfer services has become quite high in Singapore. Dash is the latest in a large number of similar platforms that have been launched in the country in the past few months.
Singapore continues to prove itself as an attractive mobile commerce market
Singapore has become a very attractive mobile commerce market, but there were very few mobile-centric platforms available to consumers until this year. These services are becoming more common as more retailers, banks, and telecommunications companies begin to involve themselves in the mobile commerce space. The recent flood of mobile services has created a great deal of competition for the attention and support of consumers and no single platform has yet managed to establish itself as the absolute favorite among any significant number of people.
Retailers could add further momentum to the growth of mobile shopping and payments as they become more involved in this burgeoning sector
As retailers become more involved in the mobile space, consumers are likely to become more exposed to the idea of mobile commerce. Banks and telecommunications companies have already been exposing consumers to mobile commerce, but the retail environment is especially influential when it comes to encouraging consumer behavior.
