Myntrality – no please, says Myntra

BENGALURU: Sai Gaddam is 35 and a PhD in computational neuroscience. He runs a software company called MakkhiChoose (Hindi slang for miser) and he is a fan of Myntra, the fashion etailer subsidiary of Flipkart. He used to like their desktop website. But then Myntra went app-only two weeks ago. Gaddam was disappointed. What he did next was close to genius and quirky to the core, and got him a legal notice – to cease and desist - from Myntra.
Gaddam took the whole experience of the Myntra app back to the personal computer and called it Myntrality. The website took information from the Myntra app — much like Google mines data from web pages — and converted the display into a desktop website format (no transactions were possible). He enjoyed, with another 50,000 aficionados of Myntra, the lost charm of the now forbidden site for 36 hours (3 days ago) before it was taken down by the creators, as Myntra came knocking.
With around 90% of Myntra's traffic coming from mobile phones, the company has decided to focus on the app, which it said would help to service customers better. But 30% of its sales were still made on the desktop site, indicating a big chunk still preferred the big screen.
“This (Myntrality) had to be done…people giving lame excuses that maintaining a site is costly and resource consuming, here is a startup doing what a company having millions at its disposal ‘finds hard’”, was one of the comments on Reddit, a community discussion platform.
Gaddam says Myntra’s decision to shut the website was puzzling. “Myntra had one of the best user interfaces and user experiences among Indian e-commerce websites. I personally missed the Myntra desktop website,” says Gaddam, an alumnus of IIT Madras. His MakkhiChoose is a browser extension software that helps to compare the price of the products across all major e-commmerce websites. “Our intention was to see how the consumer would react. So an interested team member took it as a side project,” says Gaddam.