Mobile shopping on Flipkart, Snapdeal could bloat your mobile bills

The next phase for Flipkart, after Myntra, is to go mobile and discontinue their desktop browser website. The main reason for doing this is to attract larger revenue and allowing people to shop from anywhere, rather than accessing desktop PC. Since the smartphone users in India are rising and there are more smartphones per user than PCs, Flipkart is taking their business to every hand in the country.

However, an information from Livemint about Flipkart’s next business module for smartphones will scare a few too many out there. Not only those who are dedicated to shopping on Flipkart, others who linger into the shopping website for window shopping or even to find interesting deals and prices will also be hugely affected. If the information is certain, then users will be surely seeing high data bills from their telecom companies, unless they are on a wireless internet source.

Flipkart has planned to start showing up native ads and videos (YouTube already does that to us) on their mobile app. This will increase the amount of data being consumed for the common man, unless he chooses a free hotspot or stays on wireless networks. Implementing native ads and videos means you will be forced to download the advertisement, be it a GIF image or a video, there will be no way to stop it, even with an ad blocker app.

Now imagine if you are using 3G (or god forbid 4G), then you will buffer the ad faster and you are sure to use up a huge amount of data from your account. This, in short, will spell worse for the shopping portal, which will divert users to other shopping apps/websites. What’s worse; shoppers/users will be targeted with ads based on their shopping habits that will be collected by the servers. (So stop shopping for that lingerie already).

Livemint also reported that Snapdeal will join the same game on their smartphone apps too. Flipkart has been testing their apps with native ads and will enforce them soon enough. They have stated that Myntra will not be affected for now, but after the experimenting with Flipkart is successful, Myntra may be next, stated Flipkart, according to Livemint.

Since banner ads don’t work well with smartphones, and they can be blocked out too, the move has taken Flipkart and Snapdeal to go with native ads, forcing users to watch the content, even if they don’t want to. Mint also reported that Flipkart is working AdIQuity Technologies, a mobile advertising technology firm, to implement the same.

Flipkart seems to target the audience with ads to boost their revenue, similar to how Alibaba does in China, which gains more than 50 per cent sales via ads.

So, would you want to see ads on your smartphone? Or will you prefer to take your shopping elsewhere? While Flipkart and Snapdeal could successfully work themselves upwards with the new business module, it could also fall flat with the app-only shopping website. However, it’s only a matter of time till the users face the smartphone screens.