Taking mobile first to the mobile-only extreme. This should be good.
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This is also an attempt to get our engineers to think mobile only
So, he’s trying to inconvenience people who don’t have/use the app for one reason or the other because he can’t get his engineers to prioritize that side of their development? Or, is this because people couldn’t be bothered to send in bug reports for their app?
If you ask me though, this is a good opportunity to see what stuff Konga’s army of developers are made of, yes?
No. I don’t care about what Konga devs are made of, as long as their site/apps do what they’re supposed to do.
Regardless, it begs the question, why does Sim keep trying to push the QA tasks of their mobile app to users? If mobile app usage is ‘exploding’, why does this somehow result in turning off their site? On what planet is this a good idea? I rarely use Konga so I’m not losing sleep over this but my goodness, what a weird decision. Not everyone that uses them has a smartphone. They only have Android and iPhone apps, what about those with feature phones, or Windows phones? How short-sighted can a company be?
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I just hope there’s some science to it and not because flipkart did it too: http://time.com/3829150/india-flipkart-tech-e-commerce-website-mobile-app/
Lets see how this plays out
Konga is taking a Big Risk. A very Big one
Quick aside: upon reading the current version of the linked article and then @onyeka’s reply, I have to ask @lordbanks why the original article was edited. Hmmm… 
For the benefit of future readers, the original article was edited to exclude the following, which seems innocuous enough to me:
“App usage and traffic is exploding” says Sim Shagaya, Konga’s founder and CEO. “This is also an attempt to get our engineers to think mobile only…it’s a good way to find out robustness of mobile APIs. Mobile is just another front end."
But back to my original point: I can’t say whether this is a good tactic that’s part of a larger non-public strategy, or a bad short-sighted idea…I’ll defer to Mr. Shagaya & co…but I can say it’s a pretty bold experiment, assuming (fairly I think) that the majority of Konga users don’t use/have the Konga app.
But it does make me think, given the earlier Radar conversation on pay-on-delivery, that a similar bold experiment (a “mega sale that promises mega discounts” if you use the app pre-pay) may not be as unreasonable as some thought (myself & apparently @Obi_Ik included.)
Maybe Konga sees its mobile app usage as more problematic/important/actionable than moving customers towards pre-pay?
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Innocuous, yes, but that quote was used in error, my bad.
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- It’s a 5 day experiment not a complete change in MO
- It’s K.O.N.G.A not PeeMarket, they can afford to take one for the team for 5 days at least this one time.
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I think they could have held the promo without turning off the main site. If I, as a buyer, got to Konga and saw a big sign that said that I would get a huge discount if I used the app instead, that would be enough to get me on there. Not a fan of taking away user options for an internal experiment.
they can afford to take one for the team for 5 days at least this one time.
It’s not about them, it’s about the customer. It should always be about the customer. 5 days is a long time on the web.
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Funny, that is the point I’ve been trying to make in the COD argument.
Not the same thing, at ALL, and this is not the topic to discuss it tbh.
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It’s funny though but the whole exercise will most likely hit the company’s bottomline on Thursday (maybe Monday too), Friday is a public holiday and the rest, weekend. Good experiment but COD is a hindrance to how much value can be captured during the promo (impulse purchase vs order cancellation) . I also think that it’s doubling down strategy on the current growth rate of their mobile audience vs desktop. Always experiment!
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The owner of Coscharis once said,"In other to succeed in business an entrepreneur must be ready to be misunderstood one too many times ". It’s important we keep innovating in terms of business approach even if it fails we can always learn from it and do better next time. yes, they will certainly loose some patronage within the period but that cannot be compared to invaluable business lessons they must have acquired to enable them throw in a game changer within the nearest future possible displacing jumia and co.
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Once I go to Konga and it doesn’t load. Na to go Jumia
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up to 75% discounts if i use the app during that time? Mehn, i’ll even pray that they extend it beyond five days. 
One time oo…jejely.
If they actually do this, I am so not buying from them. I just added a couple of items that I plan to pay for like on Monday. I will definitely not be forced into downloading their app for any reason
Is the idea here to incentivize (force) people to get the mobile app? Because this really shouldn’t be necessary from a technical perspective. They could have A/B tested, by diverting a portion of their mobile traffic to the new site. Or are they trying to ensure that the mobile site can handle the full traffic load? There are other ways to do that without shutting down your main site for 5 days. I have to say, the whole thing seems very unnecessary to me.
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Depends on what they’re trying to achieve. If they increase the amount of their mobile app installations, marketing those people will become much easier. They’ll just send out push notifications. me thinks…
I tend to agree with the ideas expressed before. You don’t need to shut down the desktop side. You create a mobile only promo and you can test
what it sounds to me, we need a big maintenance work in our desktop and instead of announcing downtime they just focus on mobile
having said that Kong has been way more mobile focused than Jumia from day one and I think that is the way (but without eliminating desktop channel just focusing more on mobile one, which btw is not just the app but a native browser experience I hope )