Indian e-commerce is undergoing a seismic shift, and Gen Z is at the epicenter. Flipkart's bold strategy to capture this elusive demographic? A radical overhaul of its product journeys for a smarter, faster, and hyper-intuitive experience. Get an inside look at how Flipkart's mindful app and UI innovations are not just about winning over Gen Z but also rewriting the rules of e-commerce engagement in India. The future is here, and it's tailored for the digital native. Read more.
In a country where over half the population is under 30, the future of online shopping is not just digital — it is Gen Z. This cohort of always-online, design-conscious, and culturally attuned shoppers is rapidly becoming the dominant force in India’s e-commerce economy.
So what does the future of digital commerce look like in the context of the Indian consumers’ ever-changing requirements? At Flipkart, it’s about continual reimagining rather than simply updating as innovators and domain experts build and scale the app experience – aiming for a young, fresh, and relevant user experience.
Read how they’re shaping the future of e-commerce by not just reacting to change, but anticipating it, creating a platform that deeply resonates with Gen Z and sets a new standard for the industry.
Design in the Gen Z Era
Gen Z has emerged as a critical inflection point for e-commerce in India. While Flipkart’s previous redesign in 2022 served as a crucial foundational step, the 2024-25 strategy aims to make Flipkart ‘Gen Z first’ – a move underpinned by a deep analytical understanding of their digital fluency and unique expectations. It’s what laid the groundwork of simplifying the information architecture – from cleaning up legacy menus, decluttering the homepage, and establishing intuitive touchpoints.
“This generation, born between 1997 and 2012, now accounts for a significantly large base of shoppers on e-commerce platforms. Today, it is about 40%,” explains Gaurav Mathur, Vice President, Design at Flipkart.
Gen Z are characterized by their experimental nature, heavy reliance on social media for inspiration, and a preference for online brand discovery and purchase decisions.
To cater to this, the new Flipkart app foregrounds personalized, media-rich experiences with features like inline category pages, video commerce, and dynamic theming across verticals. More than aesthetics, it marked a strategic pivot — one from usability to desirability, from structure to storytelling, all while blending legacy logic with Gen Z intuition. A cornerstone of this innovation is Flipkart’s New Design System 3.2.
“Since December, we have been steadily working towards a more modern homepage experience. Firstly, we elevated the visual language of the app with stylish, contemporary imagery and a strong emphasis on video.
Today, users encounter rich video content seamlessly embedded across the shopping journey, alongside larger, more vibrant visuals that reflect a refreshed aesthetic. In the new design, we have streamlined the icon for clarity and impact,” says Mathur.
The result of these changes is a cleaner, bolder Flipkart logo that stands out more prominently on users’ devices — a subtle but meaningful signal of the refreshed Flipkart experience.
As Gaurav Mathur elaborates, “This is an extensive design system that allows us to be more agile while being backed by sophisticated tech.”
The Engineering of Experience: Trend-forward, Product-first, Predictable
The transformation also centers on making the homepage a “predictable destination” – catering to well-known digital consumer psychology. “It is all about thinking, how do we make Flipkart young, fresh, and relevant to this generation who have seen their earlier generation also use the same app? Over time, brands also sort of lose relevance and users aren’t inspired,” says Ahmed Touseefullah Siddiqui, Director, Product at Flipkart.
To counter this, the new design aims for product-first browsing and predictable navigation for habit building, not just in terms of top-level tabs but within categories themselves. Beyond the home screen, the app is strategically evolving into a destination for seamless browsing, moving decisively beyond purely transactional searches. A critical aspect of this foresight is understanding Gen Z’s unique shopping habits.
“When we talked to Gen Z, what we uncovered was that they’re looking for the latest trend at the best value,” explained Saloni Arya, Senior Director, Product. Flipkart’s answer to this is a sophisticated trends identification engine, capable of spotting viral trends and rapidly tagging relevant products. This ensures the app is always showcasing the most up-to-date selection which keeps refreshing quickly.
This engineering prowess allows for experiences like inline category landing pages, which surface right on the homepage. So, a user doesn’t have to navigate away – creating a seamless browsing journey.
To scale these innovations rapidly across Flipkart and sister apps like Shopsy, the Flipkart team built ATLAS, a unified low-code/no-code platform. This tech backbone helps deploy new features 40% faster, with fewer resources, across all device formats.
“The power of platforms like ATLAS is not just in faster development—it’s in the ability to launch and experiment at scale, across small and large screens, with real speed and agility,” explains Ajay Kumar Singh, Senior Director, CSE Platforms, Flipkart, elaborating that it was a conscious shift to a customer-first approach rather than a an OS-first approach.
Watch:
Video Commerce: Content is Kween for Immersive Engagement
As Gen Z continues to redefine consumer expectations, at Flipkart, video commerce – an underpenetrated market in India – is not just an add-on, but a central pillar of the app experience.
At the heart of this transformation lies Flipkart’s primary research revealing that 75% of Gen Z shoppers prefer video-based content to make purchase decisions. Whether live commerce, short videos, or catalog explainers, video is reshaping the e-commerce funnel from inspiration to conversion.
“We treat video as a first-class citizen on our app — it is no longer a side story. It is how Gen Z consumes media, and it must be how they discover products,” explains Neha Agrahari, Senior Director, Video Commerce, Flipkart.
To address the creator gap, Flipkart launched ‘Creator Cities’ – internal production engines capable of generating thousands of videos daily. This combines trend identification (via platforms like WGSN, Style Luma, and in-house tools) with rapid execution.
The strategic overhaul, spearheaded by a robust Design System 3.2 and a commitment to intuitive, predictable navigation, highlights the technological prowess underpinning this shift.
From AI-powered trend identification to a full-fledged video commerce ecosystem, the strategic overhaul is curated to resonate with the visually driven, trend-conscious preferences of the next generation. It goes beyond launching a better app — it’s about building for a future, for the digitally native Indian, all while setting new benchmarks for engagement, discovery, and relevance in the brand new era.
