Remember that small chat bubble that pops out while using Flipkart mobile app, allowing you to chat directly with your friends on the shopping app. You were able to share products, photos, videos, wishlist and last but not least participate in the ‘Ping and Win’ contest.
India’s top e-commerce player Flipkart is shutting down ‘Ping’ the shopping chat feature that’s baked into its mobile apps, due to lack of customer interest. Ping was launched last year aimed to bring a social layer over the shopping experience, as part of the company’s app-only strategy.
As ping was mostly customers to customers chat features, Flipkart is currently working on a new feature allowing its users to chat with sellers on its marketplace and also with the customer case executives. It’s somewhat similar to what Paytm brought two years ago with its ‘Bargain’ feature which is essentially a user to seller chat.
“Flipkart has launched a pilot for ‘user to seller’ chat and will soon begin ‘user to customer care’ chat on its platform,” said the company in a statement to Business Standard. “Flipkart started testing the user-to-seller chat with a few sellers in April 2016 and has received a great response from both sellers as well as customers.” the company added.
Along with Ping, Flipkart has also pulled the plug on the image search feature, that allowed its users to find similar fashion products by simply taking a picture of a cloth or any fashion product. This was all part of the companies ambitious app-only strategy that crashed.
Recently only Flipkart owned fashion portal Myntra relaunched its desktop website and mobile website, sighting loss in traffic and sales when it went app-only a few years ago. Flipkart too relaunched its mobile website – Flipkart Lite with the help of Chrome team.