Mobiles are the most personal thing that people have today and which they carry everywhere, even toilets.
So a person visiting a site (after registration) probably gives following information to the online retailers:
1. Name, Age, Address, Ph No
2. Your shopping preference from your browsing history
3. Info from cookies
4. Atmost, your location (that too mostly within a range)
For above they have to host and update their website which takes a huge amount of resources.
Now let's see what the online retailers get when we use their app:
1. All of the above
2. Personalized shopping preference (by accessing other apps you have installed and used)
3. More accurate location (thanks to GPS and more accurate Glonass)
4. Ability to constantly push us notifications about "new deals" and "bumper sales" that most people wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to watch
5. Much greater access to us since we carry our phones everywhere (so eventually when we get bore, we will catch that popup notification which will lure us into browsing their products).
And following Bonus advantages:
1. Less Distractions and choice: On PC we can easily search for products on other sites and compare the prices. App means its harder for us now if not impossible. For layman, that means more (or most) time to the specific online retailer only.
2. Less choice: In an app it's harder to see choices about same product. Mostly there's no 'similar items' or choice of selecting same product selling for lower price by another seller. Results in them monopolizing the seller.
3. No review: Mostly on mobile apps, users don't really care about reading long reviews. (Or even app don't provide reviews on mobiles). Thereby a person is more likely not be affected by any negative review. (Although it's double edged, since he would also likely to 'not' buy stuff since a good review is not available to him.) This could be worse if the online retailer decides to sensor bad reviews citing 'smaller real estate to show more reviewes' as the reason.
"Die for" Bonus advantage:
For all these they don't have to "host" anything on any website. The app installed on our mobiles are the front-ends, while they only need to maintain backend (database). So they have effectively eliminated the website designers/testers thereby freeing up a lot of resources.
PS:Btw, Myntra will most prolly gonna fire their website team now. Sad.
