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Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

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Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#41

Post by chdir »

vidyesh wrote: post #25
chdir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent, Flipkart.com:India::Amazon.com:USA is more accurate than Amazon.in:India::Amazon.com:USA. Amazon.in is following a purely marketplace model i.e. only 3rd party sellers (which is unlike the Amazon we know in US). Whereas Flipkart has a large percentage of stuff offered by 'WS Retail', which is essentially Flikart itself.

Technically Flipkart isn't a Indian company as Flipkart is registered in SG. But since all its operations are in India you could say it serves India. Just like amazon.in which serves India. WS Retail is now a separate entity not run by Flipkart anymore. It was sold last year. This was mainly to bypass the FDI laws. So WS Retail is like a wholesaler. So WS Retail is a seller technically. Also you cannot say they run o…

I'm aware of the stuff they are pulling to escape the Enforcement Directorate & foreign investment related laws. Still, from a perception point of view, I feel, as of now, they are the "Amazon of India" more than Amazon.in themselves.

Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#42

Post by gumshuda »

bgdam wrote: post #2

Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than no…

Still they sold items of more than $100 million and thats what we are discussing. Some items were cheaper on other sites in festive season but that doesn't make it a flop. Also they didn't inflate MRP just removed discount on few items slowly and added it back on sale day.Though they did give great discounts on most of the categories and items .I don't understand what is wrong with that. They wanted people to buy items online and they were successful in doing that.

Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#44

Post by chdir »

gumshuda wrote: post #42
bgdam wrote: post #2

Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than no…

Still they sold items of more than $100 million and thats what we are discussing. Some items were cheaper on other sites in festive season but that doesn't make it a flop. Also they didn't inflate MRP just removed discount on few items slowly and added it back on sale day.Though they did give great discounts on most of the categories and items .I don't understand what is wrong with that. They wanted people to buy ite…

Reasons for backlash (all aren't true for every retailer & every product category, but frequently, this is what people complain about during these huge sales). The sentiment was similar yesterday across the board:

- Didn't prepare well for the rush of buyers. It was an online stampede, all day. Frequent server timeouts. Products lost from cart, technical issues due to which discounts were shown incorrectly, product cancelled after purchase was completed. These are primarily technical failures.

- Non branded items are very frequently listed at more than MRP.

- Sub-standard products (factory seconds, poorly packaged returned items, damaged boxes etc.) are sold off as new items.

- The brouhaha was not worth the time for most. E.g. snapdeal listed iPhone 5s for about $400. God knows how many pieces they had in stock. It could be 0, 5, 100. However, if they go out of stock in 5-10 seconds, they are probably hoodwinking the customers.

Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#45

Post by webbrahmin »

bilalhusain wrote: post #9
bgdam wrote: post #2

Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than no…

I am sure they weren't deliberately tricking the customers, instead it is their incompetence and immaturity showing up. They couldn't handle the commotion and steps taken to handle the load backfired (A completely made up example can be that they started the crashed servers but in panic forgot to apply the discount configuration). Disclosure: I worked at Flipkart. I felt that employees are immature.

Flipkart is immature? It is the largest e-commerce companies in India.

Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#47

Post by saanilb »

bgdam wrote: post #2

Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than no…

many sellers are happy, one article from nextbigwhat

http://www.nextbigwhat.com/flipkart-seller-feedback-marketpl...

Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

#50

Post by kartikkumar »

I just received a well-crafted apology email "from the founders" (I'm guessing it's "on behalf of" instead of "from", but I might be wrong about that). It's interesting because it's quite long and aims to cover all of the problems that led to their failures yesterday.

The email to me communicates that they were just completely ill-prepared, which doesn't bode well for a company with growth aspirations. In a highly competitive environment, I can appreciate their frankness about the problems that they faced, but in truth, each one of them should have been tackled BEFORE planning such an event. None of the problems can be considered a surprise, and I think that they will have to do a lot more damage limitation to get consumers to trust their operations.

For those that don't have access to the email itself, I've dumped it in a Gist [1].

[1] https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932

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