India's leading online retailer 'Flipkart' yesterday launched one of its kind service named 'Ping'. As the name suggest its an interactive feature that lets users to create their own shopping group within the Flipkart app to discuss among the group members about any product available on the store, the service has interesting use cases and is truly innovative idea converted into reality, the feature is developed solely and purely by Flipkart in India and that gives us another reason to fellow Indians to be proud of having Flipkart.
 | "Shopping is primarily a social activity and going for it with friends and family has been the norm since time immemorial. Online shopping, on the other hand, has largely remained a solo experience. ‘Ping’ aims to transform online shopping by allowing users to talk to each other real time in order to make decisions and decide on what to buy!” said Flipkart’s Chief Product Officer, Punit Soni |
| Flipkart Chief Product Officer - Mr. Punit Soni |
Since the time I was exposed to internet one of the best things that has happened to me is Flipkart, this Indian startup has done what no other company had done earlier. Flipkart made us comfortable doing online shopping and reached to millions of customers with services like Cash on Delivery and 30 Days return guarantee with no questions asked. Ecommerce industry in India we see today owes much to companies like Flipkart. Flipkart seems to keep up the expectation and is certainly a leader on its own.
The new service from the ecomm giant is no marketing gimmick it is pure technology and excellent use case solution. So far we see online shopping as a convenience where in we don't have to stand in queues, no going out, no walking from counter to counter , shop to shop but did we ourselves ever thought what we are missing doing all the stuff online? Perhaps most of us didn't and just enjoy the convenience it offers sacrificing the core happiness of shopping but Flipkart did thought about that is here with a real working solution that not only solves this problem but also gives you lot more than what you would have expected.
So what it is all about?
Let's start with an offline shopping scenario, what you do when you visit a shop or mall physically? First thing, you most probably go with a friend, relative or with a group; you look for various options available, you select something, you buy it ? No.. you ask for opinion from the people around you isn't that obvious, and after lots of discussions about your choice, their choice , item's price etc etc you finally decides to buy the product. Don't you miss this while shopping online, or how many times you have shared a link with your hubby to tell "hey this top is looking good on flipkart, should I buy it now?" and by end of the day you hear the same response "Oh! aaj to maine FB/Whatsapp dekha hi nahi" (Oh! today I didn't checked FB/Whatsapp). So now you know the problem lets head on to the solution now.
The 'Ping' is a new feature of the app which lets users to select members from their contact list to form a group and start a discussion about shopping. To be clear this is not a social messaging app it is just a feature built within the Flipkart app. Now you can just long tap on a product and drag to already existing groups and start a discussion on the same. The beauty of the service is that when the member from other side clicks on the product from the 'Ping' it directly opens the same page without searching the product again. Or if you want to buy something for a friend just create a group selecting your other friends from your phonebook and brainstorm on the best possible gift and that will be a perfect place to hide from the friend who is going to receive the gift.
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| Flipkart Ping |
The service doesn't just stop at discussions you can do a lot more with it you can add a product from you recent visited products or wishlist or cart, you can share your screen, share from your gallery or even use your camera to capture something on the fly and start discussing about that, isn't that cool.
Flipkart also launched its image search feature which allows users to take a photograph of the desired item and select category (not required always) and will get all matching products from Flipkart. You can then always narrow down your results based on color, size, price etc.
Something technical
Flipkart's Chief Product Officer Mr. Punit Soni, emphasized a lot on the technical aspects of the feature gave us an insight about what has gone behind the scenes in creating these world class features. For starter the Flipkart app consumes 1/6th of your data as it compresses the content that gets delivered on your phone which gives users who are still on 2G networks similar services as the users on advanced networks experience. The chat feature which involves a floating icon is actually built from scratch as the default apis provided by Android needs version 4.1 or higher to support that feature. When a company invests so much energy and time giving user experience as ultimate priority it really tells what kind of services you can expect from them.
How to get it?
Flipkart has already updated its application, however to use the 'Ping' feature you need an invite which will be released by Flipkart in different phases. Once you get the invite you can further invite 10 of your friends from your phone book and thus the organic growth is what Flipkart is seeking at this point of time.
Have any questions, comments, reviews of the features feel free to comment on the post and we will be happy to respond in our best capacity.
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