Sachin Bansal of Flipkart and Mukesh Bansal of Myntra met the press in Bengaluru on Tuesday on the occasion of Myntra becoming an “App only” medium. FE’s Avanish Tiwary and Vidya Ram were there to listen to the two posterboys of the Indian e-commerce space. Edited Excerpts:

Why is Flipkart hesitating in going mobile only?

Sachin Bansal: We want to create the mobile experience for every category and not only for a few of them. It was easier to launch Myntra as app-only as it has just one category, whereas Flipkart has around 20 categories. For a few specific categories, we need to do extra work and because we have so many categories, we need to do some more of extra work. It’s not about whether we will move to mobile only, but when we will move.

Your recent acquisitions were also in the mobile space. What are the other plans you have for mobile?

Sachin Bansal: Mobile strategy is something that we have started thinking about six months ago and have been planning our acquisitions accordingly. Mostly what these acquisitions like Adiquity, Appiterate, etc, give us is key talent, and people who have had experience in the mobile space. Moreover, in a couple of days, you will see ads on Flipkart from the sellers. Mobile ad paradigm is very different throughout the world. The whole banner thing on desktop doesn’t work on mobile. So we were thinking about native ads on mobile and also video ads. Adiquity has experience in mobile ad search for four years now.

Even though 90% traffic is mobile only, your revenue source from mobile is 70%. What about the remaining 30% revenue that you lose?

Mukesh Bansal: We are not going to lose on revenue at all. It may take few months, but every single person will move to mobile. We want to leverage everything to make a better mobile experience and product for users. Right now, we are investing in our own brands, scaling up in terms of technology, team and the Myntra brand.

Is Flipkart very bullish on acquiring overseas talent?

Sachin Bansal: We see the kind of problems that we are trying to solve are very much global in nature. There is a huge Indian talent in the Silicon Valley and a high degree of interest for Indian tech start-ups. Instead of looking at India only, we feel that there is a need to look at other geographies too. We are more focused on exceptional talent and looking at people who want to move back to India.

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