Flipkart, India’s e-commerce giant with the exclusive rights to a number of handsets and manufacturers including Xiaomi and Motorola, have updated their Android application to bring support for the Android Wear platform. Now, users can receive push notifications from Flipkart to their Android Wear smartwatch as well as being able to view their wishlist on their wrists. Flipkart have also written that there are a list of features in the “coming soon” list including the ability to manage order tracking information, price cuts and personalized offers. Currently, the application already includes some great features but these are going to be improved upon in the coming weeks and months.
You can grab the application here. Flipkart’s announcement made much of the Android application’s features, including a fast, efficient and clean interface giving customers a choice of payment options (cash on delivery, credit or debit card, EMI, NetBanking and PayZippy). The application also includes a smartsearch function whereby customers can look up products by category, name, brand or barcode and there’s also a voice search, which is perfect if you’re not sure how to spell a particular product or brand. The Android application also provides personal offers plus exclusive app-only deals. There’s one-touch Wishlist management and since both the smartphone and smartwatch are synchronized, this makes it easy to keep up with your desired products. It’s unclear at the moment how much detail the Android Wear application will be able to provide users on their wishlist.
This development is notable because Flipkart is the first e-commerce website to launch an Android Wear compatible application. It’s a great step forward for the e-commerce retailer and a move that we’re confident other similar businesses will follow (and are I’m sure already working on the project). Google Now already includes some baked-in functionality when it comes to delivery of packages and similar assuming the user receives delivery confirmation emails into his or her Gmail account (perhaps this will change with the new Gmail version as it’ll include support for non-Gmail addresses?) but having notifications synchronized between the smartphone application and the Android Wear device is a great step forwards. And I need to write that from my perspective, if I had a choice of e-commerce websites, I’ll pick the one that makes it easier to access my gadgets. Way to go Flipkart!