http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-... - Apology from Flipkart
Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
#52Most 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.
There were several people that took screenshots of the advertized things going 'Out of Stock' even BEFORE the sale officially began. They might actually be deceiving people? We'd know in coming few days.
Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
#53This article has a few details on why this week was important for e-commerce sites in India: http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-web... The incumbents from Silicon Valley may not have the Cultural understanding of the Indian market and the barriers to utilizing Large scale distributed technology platforms have never been lower. I boldly (and somewhat foolishly) predict that as more and more India…
I've been a 11 year customer of Amazon US and a 2 year customer at Amazon.in. They certainly do get Indian culture. Amazon India isn't a bunch of white people from Seattle arriving en masse and setting up shop. They hired locally (including from Indian incumbents) and localized their operations to include stuff like COD, local language support etc. Amazon is well on its way to becoming as 'local' as McDonalds or Hond…
Last time I tried (guess it was last year), Amazon.in didn't have enough products I could buy. It was really looking like a family-run home business just went online (whereas flipkart was massive). Don't know if that's still the case.
Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
#54As we more westernised in our outlook, bigbillionday is something similar to "Black Friday" and deep discount on single day ....might do more for overall internet penetration....currently only 25% of Indians have access to Internet, which stands at 243 million , if this crosses to 340 million, That's a huge market growth of Internet users ...this will in the long term benefit everybody.....perhaps remove poverty of m…
Indeed, getting Indians to move from buying gold for no good reason to buying garbage for no good reason = progress to first world status.
I am just making point of "explosive growth of internet" might be the beneficiary ....in the process we might become more westernised...I don't mind that as long as it can remove poverty of 500 million Indians.....more than 200 million people live in abject poverty( poorest of the poor)...Internet penetration is known to uplift most people out of abject poverty...wish more Indians are online ...and the world will come and invest big billions...imagine both Europe+Usa = india market size..it's possible...but it takes effort and discipline..
Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
#55As we more westernised in our outlook, bigbillionday is something similar to "Black Friday" and deep discount on single day ....might do more for overall internet penetration....currently only 25% of Indians have access to Internet, which stands at 243 million , if this crosses to 340 million, That's a huge market growth of Internet users ...this will in the long term benefit everybody.....perhaps remove poverty of m…
".....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians." It sounds so easy when you put it like that. Thank you :)
Yes it's the antidote for our poorest of the poor 200 million Indians...hope internet penetration removes that many Indians out of poverty...it's possible and most likely solution.
Re: Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day
#56Most 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…
Apology mail from Flipkart
Dear Customer,
Yesterday was a big day for us. And we really wanted it to be a great day for you. But at the end of the day, we know that your experience was less than pleasant. We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry.
It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. We didn't source enough products and deals in advance to cater to your requirements. To add to this, the load on our server led to intermittent outages, further impacting your shopping experience on our site.
An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.
And this is not acceptable to us.
Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. Yesterday, we failed that trust. We have learnt some valuable lessons from this and have started working doubly hard to address all the issues that cropped up during this sale.
Price Changes As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up to the sale, the pricing of several products got changed to their non-discounted rates for a few hours. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.
Out-of-stock Issues We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the out-of-stock issues.
Cancellations We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any cancellations.
Website Issues We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time.
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
Thank you. Sachin and Binny