Flipkart Ping

» see flipkart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 25 June 2016 Flipkart switched off Ping, a chat feature that had been sitting inside its shopping app for ten months. Existing conversations stayed readable for a while afterward. Nobody could start a new one.

Ping had launched on 25 August 2015. The pitch was that buying things is a social act which the internet had made lonely, so Flipkart put a messenger next to the product pages: you could send a friend a photo of a shirt and argue about it without either of you leaving the app. It was built under Punit Soni, hired out of Google in March 2015 as chief product officer and written up by the Indian business press as a genuine coup.

Ping was the visible edge of a much larger bet. Flipkart under Soni was pushing hard toward app-only, on the theory that the next hundred million Indian shoppers would arrive on a phone and never touch a desktop site at all. Myntra, which Flipkart owned, shut its website down in May 2015 to force the question. Ping made sense in that world. If the app is the entire store, conversation belongs inside the app rather than on WhatsApp.

~ the record ~

~ the app-only bet ~

The bet lost. Myntra's app-only period cost it sales and the website came back. Flipkart never followed Myntra the whole way, and Soni resigned on 13 April 2016 after roughly a year in the job. Business Standard headlined his exit as the end of Flipkart's app-only dreams, which turned out to be the accurate reading of it.

Ping outlived him by ten weeks. When Flipkart pulled it on 25 June the reason given was low customer interest, and in this case that appears to have been literal rather than diplomatic.

None of this was reachable from where I was. Ping existed only inside the Flipkart app, and the Flipkart app only meant anything if you were buying from Flipkart, which meant being in India. The argument underneath it was familiar enough, since every product team in 2015 was having some version of the fight about whether the phone had made the web irrelevant. India just had a harder version, because a large share of its users had never owned a desktop to lose.

~ what went with it ~

Image search died on the same day. That feature let you photograph a garment, or upload a picture of one, and be shown similar items from Flipkart's fashion catalog. In 2015 it sat ahead of where the technology comfortably was, and it performed about as well as that implies.

What replaced Ping was narrower and it stuck around: pilots for user-to-seller chat and for user-to-customer-care chat. Flipkart had wanted a social network and settled for a support inbox.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »