Flipkart might launch a single app to aggregate food, cab and travel

India's e-commerce giant online Flipkart is considering to become an 'everything app,' which customers can use to order food, book a cab, plan tickets for vacation, as well as to buy daily essentials.

For this, the Bengaluru-headquartered company has initiated talks with food, cab and travel aggregators seeking possible partnerships for its app-of-apps that it plans to rollout by the end of this year. However, it’s planning to have its own operations and no partnerships for its business of daily essentials.

This kind of mega app will allow it to boost customer loyalty, while being able to monetise the huge volumes of customer data that it has, and also adding to its revenue.

"The business is targeting a December launch and will follow a WeChat model, where the Flipkart app can be used to book a cab, order food or plan your travel," Prakash Sikaria, senior director of monetisation and new initiatives at Flipkart, told ET. "With the launch of loyalty points for all purchases on Flipkart, the Flipkart platform will act as a distribution channel for these services."

Using Flipkart's value-added services, customers will get a service similar to Google Areo, which works as a single stop for various on-demand services.

For customers livin in areas with slow internet because of low-band width, a multi-use app will work especially well.

It’s not for the first time that an e-commerce major has attempted something of this sort in India. Last year, Snapdeal too tried a similar strategy, making use of its tie-ups with Zomato, Uber, and Cleartrip.

However, as things turn out, Flipkart is currently in process of of buying out Snapdeal.