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 normal prices. Reports are now coming in that most people who managed to actually buy something at bargain prices had their orders cancelled by Flipkart.
#Flopkart was trending on twitter through the entire day. Flipkart called this sale the Big Billion Day, and somebody registered bigbillionday.com and redirected it to amazon.in. Also for most items that were on 'sale' on Flipkart, the non-sale prices on Amazon and Snapdeal were lower than Flipkart's 'discounted' prices. All in all, a terrible PR nightmare for Flipkart.
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.
I do agree that server crashes and products disappearing from the cart might be technical issues, they weren't able to handle (either from incompetence or other reasons).
But, if you go through my links, you will see that they were indeed deliberately tricking customers. Price tracking websites show that most Flipkart on-sale products' prices were hiked to double their original pricing and then discounts were applied. In one case, a printer was hiked from Rs. 10000 to Rs. 50000 and then sold at a 'discounted' Rs. 11000. Apart from this, they silently increased sale price when adding products to cart, and cancelled orders which people had gotten for bargain prices.
In addition, they also had numerous examples where their claimed discount percentage was not the one that was applied to the product. A discount of 3% was advertised as discount of 10%, 40 Rs off was advertised as 500 Rs off, etc.
All this has managed to completely put me off Flipkart. Prior to this I was a very happy Flipkart customer, and would preferentially order stuff from Flipkart even if it was available on Amazon for marginally lower prices. Even though I did not personally experience any of the Big Billion Day issues, the way Flipkart has handled this 'sale', has left me totally disgusted with them. I think, I'll stick to Amazon/Snapdeal from now on.
Exactly same thoughts.
I was too very happy flipkart customer untill now and always recommended flipkart as one of the most reliable e-commerce site to others but not now.
When they cancelled my LED TV order in just 2 hours (it was my only order) and instantly increased the price, even then i didn't mind it much. But today in morning when i found out that the same thing happened with many many customers, i am sure it was not unintentional.
All the negative stories and tweets in the world won't make a difference. Their prices(that only they can offer at the scale they operate at) and marketing budget will nullify it as Walmart and Amazon have already proven in the past.
This would be true if Flipkart did not have viable competitors. This is most definitely not the case. Snapdeal is another Indian e-tailer and the global e-commerce juggernaut Amazon also has an Indian site, both of which offer cheaper prices than Flipkart on a vast majority of items.
When I can get the same product for nearly the same price from Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart, why should I go with Flipkart (in light of the negative stories)?
They actually were deliberately tricking the customers. They are known for doing this. Actually Amazon.in is hitting them hard with excellent and transparent pricing, great customer service (at least from Indian standards) and that is making them desperate.
Source: I've been a customer for years and have been watching them closely :-)
I have seen Amazon.in silently adding prices during checkout (deliberate or not I can't say ofcourse). I haven't experienced Flipkart adding prices during checkout, but the prices do fluctuate while browsing over the span of a day.
I would only be able to say we have had different experiences. But in my case Amazon changes prices only after I leave the item in cart for days. And sometimes the change is +ve, sometimes -ve.
With Flipkart it feels like I am in a pricing-availability labyrinth.
And though users are frustrated, they've tasted this huge volume success with Xiaomi so it doesn't take much for them to repeat the same #FlashSale across their product category.
Exactly. Initially I thought Xiaomi/Flipkart were genuinely selling whatever phones they could make for India. But when the numbers started to come in then I realise, shit it was just marketing gimmick.
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.
> Reports are now coming in that most people who managed to actually buy something at bargain prices had their orders cancelled by Flipkart.
I can confirm this from multiple sources. The orders were cancelled citing "allowing other customers a fair opportunity" . Some people are mulling over legal options including a litigation to regulate such e-commerce malpractices.
> Some people are mulling over legal options including a litigation to regulate such e-commerce malpractices
Much needed. About time there's some regulation & transparency on pricing & discounts. E-commerce companies need to respect the meaning of MRP (Maximum Retail Price). The #BigFoolingSales need to have the fine print spelled out properly. Ebay India pulls the same crap multiple times a year. There are 3rd party sellers like cart2india that list stuff at waay more than the printed price and then offer huge discounts, still charging you more than what you'd pay at a brick & mortar store.
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.
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.
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.
For readers who aren't from India and wondering about the "festive season", the Indian festive season is different from US. The festive season is generally considered the period between two festivals Dussehra (triumph of good over evil) [0] and Diwali (festival of lights) [1]. In 2014, the Dussehra and Diwali fall on 4th October and 23rd October, respectively.
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].
Yesterday was flopkart not flipkart. Even I wanted to buy some offers in flipkart deliberately. But eventually, i ended up buying the same thing in Amazon.in. Since, the price of the thing is lower in amazon than the flipkart's big billion day.
To put that in perspective, if Flipkart has sales of $100M every day of the year, at $36.5 billion, it would be half of Amazon's e-commerce revenue of $67.9 billion [0].
I think you are looking at it from the economy perspective at current time. But in the long term, Indian market is going to grow and others are not going to grow at similar pace.
The magic is in compound interest.
also, Amazon is available in lot of countries, whereas Flipkart is essentially India only. Over that, there is the currency and per capita differences.
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 on different models, Flipkart does have more than a one seller so the model is still the same as amazon. Flipkart just eats other sellers at times with the WS Retailer's discounts and stuff. Just like amazon?
If every legal aspect is off the table then Flipkart is running WS Retail and other sellers are at mercy of Flipkart's(WS Retail) listing price.
Also Amazon.in sellers are all Indian (brick and mortar stores)sellers, so theres that.
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.
Flipkart heavily advertised for the campaign, spent lots of money. Also steep discounts for the products helped them to increase the top line. Amazon India got good mileage even though they havent planned much.
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 Indians get online, get comfortable with spending online, there will be a huge wave of India focused sites that will become the next Billion dollar companies.
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 Honda have already. Their capability to deliver in Tier II and III cities is already ahead of Flipkart for example. GMV is currently about 35% of Flipkart and I wouldn't be surprised if they overtook them in two years.
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.
"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."
What do you think are the barriers to utilizing large scale distributed technology platforms? I personally don't think this is a cultural thing.
The scale of China can't be matched by any other single country. But considering India's past and present, this is the largest ever e-commerce sale pulled off by it's own local company which is a giant leap in it's struggling economy.
To me, what's happening in India e-commerce growth is just extension or expansion of Amazon model, on a bigger scale perhaps.
But for Alibaba, it is truly revolutionary if you look at how much of their Tmall sales percentage(relative to taobao) in that $5.78 billion sales, it is truly manufacturer-to-consumer.
As 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 more than 500 million Indians.
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..
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.
Apart from all the complaints about how the whole thing was managed,this marks as one big day for the e-com industry in the country. A lot of people had their first online purchange experience.A big step to target the next billion users maybe.
#Flopkart was trending on twitter through the entire day. Flipkart called this sale the Big Billion Day, and somebody registered bigbillionday.com and redirected it to amazon.in. Also for most items that were on 'sale' on Flipkart, the non-sale prices on Amazon and Snapdeal were lower than Flipkart's 'discounted' prices. All in all, a terrible PR nightmare for Flipkart.
Some coverage in Indian media and blogs:
http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-moc...
http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100...
http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in...