Shopping goes social with Flipkart Ping

The new feature available on the Flipkart app will help users chat with friends and share their experience using text, photographs and emoticons in real time while shopping.

To further enhance customer experience, online marketplace Flipkart has announced the launch of Ping - a new 'social shopping' experience on its app. Using Ping, Flipkart users will be able to chat with friends while shopping and share their experience using text, photographs and emoticons in real time.

Flipkart believes that shopping is more than the act of viewing a catalogue, selecting a product and buying it at the click of a button and, thus, with Ping, it aims to fundamentally redefine consumers' shopping experience.

"Shopping is primarily a social activity, and going for it with friends and family has been the norm. 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 in real time in order to make decisions and decide on what to buy," says Flipkart's chief product officer, Punit Soni.

Speaking on this innovation, Peeyush Ranjan, CTO and head of engineering, Flipkart, comments, "A research conducted by our team revealed that the inability to shop collaboratively is the number one barrier for online shoppers these days. Flipkart Ping, conceived and built completely by Flipkart's in-house technology team, aims to resolve this very challenge."

"Ping has been built keeping in perspective the user experience journey of Flipkart customers. Highly advanced architecture was employed to ensure that dynamic traffic surges are handled well. It has also been optimised for efficient results even on slow 2G networks. Ping will also support Android wearables where users can read and reply to messages from their Android watches," adds Ranjan.

Currently in its beta stage of development, Ping will be available to customers through an invite-only model in the first phase.

Launched in October 2007, Flipkart is one of India's leading e-commerce marketplace which claims to offer more than 30 million products cross 70 plus categories, including books, media, consumer electronics and lifestyle.

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