Snapdeal is one of the popular India’s largest online marketplace has introduced a new mobile optimised version of Snapdeal.com called ‘Snap-lite’. The timing of the announcement is quite interesting as it comes just a few days after its rival Flipkart relaunched its own mobile website called ‘Flipkart Lite’. Earlier, Flipkart insisted its customers to download a mobile app for doing online shopping and a few days back, Flipkart partnered with Google to launch ‘Flipkart Lite’ Mobile website. The new service launched by the e-commerce player Snapdeal will work across all browsers while the Flipkart Lite works currently for Chrome users.
Snapdeal seems to challenge its rival Flipkart by announcing Snap-lite. Anand Chandrasekaran, the chief product officer at Delhi-based Snapdeal sent out a tweet informing about the launch of Snapdeal-lite. In the tweet, he stated that mobile browsing for Snapdeal will now be almost 85 percent faster with Snap Lite. As per the traffic analysis of Snapdeal, it revealed that about 33% of the website’s overall traffic comes from slower Internet connections. Hence, the new version will certainly run faster on slower connections that eventually enhances the shopping experience for the users.
Snapdeal Follows Flipkart’s Footsteps!
Snap-lite has been superintended to work with a wide variety of mobile browsers. Snapdeal.com now presents a new footer that asks the users to change to Snap Lite for superfast Snapdeal website. Just by tapping on the link, it introduces the newly designed website, ‘Snap-Lite’ to the mobile users. The snap-lite provides a responsive layout and the front page shows a search engine followed by a slideshow along with a list of all the major shopping categories.
Peeyush Ranjan, the Head of Engineering at Flipkart said, “Websites push users to install the app. But only 4% of the people actually install the app. Flipkart doesn’t have a mobile website. So we wanted to give the experience of a native application on a mobile website.”
Snapdeal launched the mobile optimised version and there is the biggest advantage through this mobile optimised version of Snapdeal where it does not require users to keep downloading all the app updates. Any new feature can be immediately made available to all the users without any special update on the user’s side.
This news comes in a matter of days after its competitor, Flipkart introduced ‘Flipkart Lite’ after pushing its app-only strategy. Flipkart partnered with the search engine giant, Google to create a new mobile optimised website that would aid smartphone users to continue shopping on the e-commerce platform without the need to install an application. Also, the users on other platforms apart from Android and iOS could also make transactions through a mobile browser in a convenient way.