E-commerce firm Flipkart is finally shutting down commerce on its website and hopping on the app-only bandwagon.

In a recent meeting with employees, Punit Soni, Chief Product Office, Flipkart, said that from September onwards, Flipkart will only sell via mobile app and their website would stop functioning, reports the Times of India.

In a statement, Flipkart said, “India is gradually transitioning from a mobile first to a mobile only country. At Flipkart, we have been following a mobile first approach and 70%-75% of our total traffic is already coming from our mobile app.”

No doubt, major e-commerce players like Amazon, Snapdeal and Ebay will be watching this development closely, even as a lot of them have repeatedly assured customers that they have no plans to enforce app-only diktat on them. These companies believe that the customers should have the right to choose the platform on which they wish to make the purchase.

However, Flipkart seems to have overlooked the fact that a majority of price comparison and product research happens on a website as its time consuming and tedious to do so on a mobile app.

Industry experts are unsure whether this is the right decision for the company or not.  Kunal Shah, Founder and CEO of Freecharge questioned the App-Only strategy in his Facebook status update (without naming Flipkart):

Interestingly, according to a Trak.in report, Myntra reported a decline in 10% of sales immediately after they went mobile-only earlier this year; despite the fact that prior to shutting down their website, they had reported 90% of traffic and 70% of sales from mobile.

At present, Flipkart registers 10 million hits a day from 45 million registered users. The company plans to double its GMV to $8 billion in 2015. Now, with this app-only strategy, it remains to be seen whether the company achieves this target or not?

Recently, the online marketplace announced that it plans to introduce a new ‘Image search’ feature on its mobile app. The feature is aimed at its fashion shoppers and will let them search for a product based on an image they might have seen.