BENGALURU: India's largest online marketplace Flipkart wants to be an 'everything app' that customers can tap into for ordering food, hailing a cab, planning a vacation, or buying daily essentials.The company has begun talks to partner with food, cab and travel aggregators for its app-of-apps that it plans to rollout by the end of this year. A mega app of this sort, Flipkart expects, will allow it to boost customer loyalty while also monetising the huge volumes of customer data it has access to and adding channels of revenue. Executed by Flipkart's app design and engineering team, the strategy, initiated by new chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy , would complement the company's advertising business. "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."Flipkart's value-added services will offer customers a service similar to Google 's recently launched Areo , which works as a single stop for various on-demand services. A single app for multiple use cases will work well especially for customers in low-band width areas.For daily essentials, Flipkart will have its own operations and not have partnerships. The company plans on launching grocery and fast-moving consumer goods offerings shortly."One advantage that Flipkart has is the large consumer base, which can monetise this strategy. For Flipkart's strategy to succeed, the app design has to be attractive, coupled with big discounts and a smooth interface," said Mrigank Gutgutia, engagement manager at research consulting firm RedSeer Consulting . China's Tencent , which recently participated in a $1.4-billion funding round in Flipkart, has successfully executed the app-in-app model through WeChat, allowing users to pay bills and order goods and services on the chat platform using their WeChat wallets.In India, online marketplace Snapdeal, which Flipkart is in talks with to buy, tried a similar strategy last year leveraging its tie-ups with food-delivery platform Zomato, taxi-aggregator Uber , and travel startup Cleartrip to increase user engagement on its app. Digital wallet Paytm , too, allows for multiple uses on its app, although not through partnerships."Both Alipay and WeChat in China have successfully demonstrated the strategy of becoming a mega app. A flipside to this is the ecommerce app becoming too busy, impacting service discovery and having too many features and services that users are not aware of," said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner "Also, for better execution, the platform will need to tie up with leading players in each segment."It was not immediately clear whether Flipkart's in-house digital wallet, PhonePe , will play a significant role in the execution of this strategy."The services will be fulfilled by the partners while the customer loyalty, transaction and revenues will increase through this app strategy. However, these are early days and the strategy needs to be refined with a six-eight month runway," said Flipkart's Sikaria.