Flipkart pulls the plug on Ping and Image Search

India’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has pulled the plug on Ping, a social platform baked into its app for users to share products with family and friends.

Ping, which was launched in August last year, was aimed at keeping customer conversations within the app as part of the company’s mobile-only focus. Flipkart says it is now piloting a new feature that will enable users to chat with sellers and customer care executives, rather than other users.

“Flipkart has launched a pilot for 'user to seller’ chat and will soon begin ‘user to customer care’ chat on its platform. Flipkart started testing the user-to-seller chat with a few sellers in April 2016 and has received a great response from both sellers as well as customers,” said the company in a statement.

Apart from Ping, the company has also discontinued its ‘image search’ feature, that was aimed at fashion shoppers looking for clothes on Flipkart similar to ones in pictures. A statement from Flipkart cited difficulty with usability as the reason for the features demise, where “many customers struggled with understanding how to upload an image.”

Both Ping and Image Search were part of Flipkart’s focus on building a mobile-only app ecosystem, with the features being used as hooks to make people download the app on their smartphones. As the company now reverts back to innovating for other platforms such as web and PCs, it is withdrawing the features as well.

While image search will be discontinued, the Flipkart app will retain its visually similar feature which it says has seen a lot more traction from users. Recently the company relaunched the desktop and mobile shopping websites for its fashion subsidiary Myntra, as it looks to tap users who it blocked out by switching to a mobile-only service.