Online fashion app Myntra reportedly plans to become the ‘Facebook of fashion’. After going ‘app-only’ recently, Myntra is now planning to turn itself into a fashion network where users can invite friends, form a group, chat, upload photos and seek out the opinion of friends and experts before buying clothes or accessories.
In other terms, the e-tailer is planning to walk on the path of some social shopping platforms of India like Limeroad, Voonix, Klip.in, among others, who through their platforms. fill a fundamental desire of any shopper for social interaction and decision reassurance while they shop on the web.
For many, shopping from a screen simply isn’t as appealing as walking into a store and making a purchase, so these social shopping platforms aim to recreate the best part of in-store shopping.
Myntra’s new platfrom, rolled out to a few users, will allow users to follow friends and brands and like, comment, share and buy products. “When you come just to shop and avail discounts, you visit maybe once or twice a month. But fashion is a category where you get inspired everyday. Hence we are building a platform where it is more of an engagement which will give our users a reason to keep coming back to our app,” Abhishek Rajan, head of mobile business at Myntra, told ET.
For instance, Social shopping platform Limeroad’s ‘scrapbook’ feature allows users to create scrapbooks in which they put together looks by mixing and matching various product combinations and share with others who can browse through them and discover interesting looks. The feature works on a focused approach to retain a prolific relationship with both customers and the vendors on Limeroad’s marketplace.
Where Limeroad presents the most preferred and unique products into one place, Klip.in, a two-year-old social shopping platform, gives users a unique and personal shopping feed.
“What makes Facebook social? It’s not just the network, but the fact that any update from people in your network comes to you, instead of you calling up all your friends to know what is going on in their lives. Similarly, on Klip, we bring the most happening fashion products relevant to your taste to your Klip feed every time you open our app or login to our site,” says Maneesh Madambath, co-founder of Klip.in.
“We also have a feature to follow your favourite online stores pages. We have users who follow up to 80-100 stores on Klip,” he adds.
Just like Klip.in, Myntra is also looking to create a feed where consumers will be able to see the cloths and accessories in trend. “Our home page will no more be the way it is today where you have offer banners and catalogues. It is going to be like the news feed you see on Facebook,” Rajan was quoted as saying.Explaining about the future of Social Shopping platforms in today’s fast changing e-commerce space, Madambath of Klip.in says, “Today, consumers are switching to platforms where the product comes to them instead of them having to go hunt them down. A segment going social is usually a natural fallout of information overload. Going social helps cut down the noise and makes things relevant to you. This makes the platform more sticky and therefore easier to create a loyal user base, as opposed to pure e-commerce, where after a sale the site has to start all over again to convert the user.”
“The key component of the growth of social shopping will be mobile penetration. Social shopping platforms are inherently mobile-friendly. You have some time to kill? You can quickly open your app and search or skip a fresh set of products even if you have no intention to buy something, or simply discover a new store and follow them. This isn’t possible with an e-comm app. Online shoppers are likely to recognise this value and gravitate towards shopping via social apps, ” asserts Madambath.
Following its parent company, Flipkart, Myntra is also also planning to introduce features such as a virtual wardrobe with pictures of users’ clothes and image searches. The latter works by subscribers taking a photo of something they like and using that to search for something similar.
