Flipkart has announced a new service called ‘Ping’ on its mobile app. Ping will allow users to shop for products on it app along with their friends.
The objective behind Flipkart’s Ping is to allows users to have real-time conversations with friends in order to get feedback about a product they plan on buying, or help friends get in on the decision of what to buy. The feature will allow users to drag and drop products directly into conversations, lets users share their screen so that they can browse products together with friends.
“Right now, shopping on a mobile is a very isolated experience and complicated. Ping is a fun new way to shop with friends. It is social shopping experience integrated in Flipkart,” Punit Soni, Flipkart’s chief product officer, said in the announcement.
For now Ping is available to a few Flipkart users on an invite basis. Gradually, it will be rolled out to all users. Every person who has an invite will also get another 10 invites to share with friends.
Also Read: Social Shopping: Taking e-commerce up close and personal
In terms of the design and look, including even the chatheads, it looks quite similar to Facebook Messenger. Keeping in mind the slow networks in India and the fact that a majority of users own a low-cost smartphone, Ping is only 2MB in size, and has been developed to consume low data, low battery and is compatible with any smartphone running on Android 2.1 and above.
Soni further said that Flipkart’s future roadmap includes ways of connecting its users to the sellers, customer service executives and Flipkart itself. This sounds similar to what Snapdeal is doing with its Shopo app, which was unveiled a couple of months ago. The platform enables seamless communication and exchange of information, including about location, images, etc between sellers and buyers.
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