With an aim to go ‘mobile only’ this year, India’s largest e-commerce player Flipkart has acquired Delhi-based Appiterate, a mobile engagement and marketing automation company, for an undisclosed amount.

Appiterate has helped leading e-commerce companies combine the power of mobile apps and big data to allow them to do one-on-one targeting of their users though push notifications and in-app messages. Post the acquisition, its mobile marketing automation platform will be integrated into Flipkart’s mobile app. This will help in precise targeting of users based on their activity on the app and Web site. Flipkart has been persistently looking to improve and expand its mobile app capabilities to cater to the shifting preferences on its user base. The company plans to invest in and acquire other companies in this domain and help in building the mobile ecosystem in India.

Nishant Verman, Senior Director, Corporate Development-Flipkart, said, “In a short span of 1.5 years, Appiterate has carved out a niche in the industry as being one of the most disruptive companies in its space. We are confident that their innovative platform and tech team will bring deep mobile capabilities to the table which is a key focus area for Flipkart.”

With mobile-commerce all set to be the future of shopping, online companies are investing heavily on strengthening their mobile technology. While few big players such as Myntra and Flipkart announcing shutting of their Web sites and going ‘mobile only’, several mid and smaller players such Paytm, PepperTap, ZopNow, Timesaverz amongst others have already build their business model on mobile platform.

Delhi-based Patym, which is backed by China’s Alibaba, is a mobile only platform and is all set to give a tough competition to Flipkart and Snapdeal, which would eventually move to mobile.

“Mobile is all-pervasive now-a-days and dominates the ongoing screen shift trend. Just on numbers. India had the third largest smartphone base in 2013. It will have 2 billion smartphone users by 2016, and every tenth smartphone will be shipped to India by 2017, according to some estimates. Hence, investor interest in mobile first companies is but natural,” says Debadutta Upadhyaya, founder of Timesaverz Mobile Application.

According to a Citi report, mobile is already 40-60 per cent of the total traffic for Internet companies, similar to China’s (Alibaba is at 42 per cent) at less than half the Internet penetration rate. With smartphone shipments growing 100 per cent annually and penetration rising over 20 per cent, companies are focusing on getting users to download apps. Mobile apps also help in better engagement and a larger share of users on app reduces dependence on paid traffic from Google and Facebook.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW