It has not even been a week since the launch of Flipkart lite, a mobile website which has been reintroduced for the purpose of garnering more sales, and Snapdeal has responded back with a snappier Snap-Lite. This mobile website has been designed specially for users still on 2G to quickly load the website, which in India makes a lot of sense and is a welcome change.
It is not that Snapdeal can’t be accessed on mobile and one has to download the app, but there was an urgency to launch a similar product going head-on with the leader. Of course, this has been the trend in India, be it the flash sales or the five day sales or ‘Daily Dhamaka Offers’, when Flipkart does something, others have to follow suit and deliver something extra and unique to its customers.
App-only deals also became a rage amongst users because of higher discounts and a plethora of offers, however there is still a certain section of the society that believes in using the web browsers for shopping.
To uncomplicate things, Snapdeal has launched the mobile browser website Snap-Lite which is apparently 85% faster, as tweeted by Anand Chadrasekaran, Snapdeal’s product officer.
Is there a https://t.co/Ed8cS7dJ8g experience that’s 85% faster? Introducing Snap-lite (across all mobile browsers). pic.twitter.com/dWtZkFniWw
— Anand Chandrasekaran (@anandc) November 12, 2015
However going by the tweets by users, it seems that it loads noticeably faster on slower connections like 2G and load times are short. This is a good news for Snapdeal fans since you can access app-like features on a mobile web browser. Anand Chandrasekaran also mentioned in his tweet that the app is available on all browsers, unlike Flipkart Lite which is available only on Google Chrome and Opera for now. However one can expect Flipkart Lite to be supported by almost all browsers by early next year.
How does Snap-Lite stack against Flipkart Lite?
Considering the website has been named cleverly, one can expect Snap-Lite to perform as good as Facebook Lite, if not better. However, the mobile website has been developed specifically for slower mobile connections, hence users on 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi will not notice much of a difference except for the user interface. While Flipkart also offers push notifications, offline functionality or pinning the website to home screen, Snap-Lite misses these features.
As reported by users on Anand Chandrasekaran’s twitter handle, website is loading smoothly on 2G, and it seems Snapdeal has hit the perfect note with Indian internet users. In addition to Snap-Lite, there is an option of switching to regular website and the desktop version as well.
Usually a mobile website’s lite versions come with their own cons like low resolution photos of products, snappy but jerkier performance and loading time issues. Surprisingly Snap-Lite does not face much issues and surpasses all expectations. After all, it is coming from an established start-up trying to rival Flipkart, which has already launched a similar product.
Overall, Snap-Lite is primarily for consumers using slower internet connections and is just as productive as its desktop version. We can expect a lot of improvements from Snapdeal going forward, and possibility of making the mobile browser version a lot app-like in usability.
