Almost the entire day I have been seeing status messages and tweets pouring in, talking about the fiasco Flipkart has created with their much hyped “Billion Day Sale”. Some have been from people who couldn’t avail the offers due to limited quantity or technical glitches, others have been from users who didn’t see any major discount on what they wanted to buy.
While I too was disappointed when I accessed Flipkart at 8am, I did manage to see quite a few great offers. One of them was Canon 1200D for 18k and other was Canon EOS-M for similar price. Sadly, I had no use for these or some of the other good offers Flipkart had. So I instead chose to order a formal shirt (50% discount) and a few cosmetics (20% discount).
I also ordered a HDD from eBay India today and had already ordered a 6 socket Belkin power strip from Amazon yesterday, during their 15 minute sale.
Ideally I would have loved to order these from Flipkart, since I am a Flipkart First Subscriber. But I am not going to hold it against Flipkart.
Why?
Because that is how sales work.
You get limited discount on limited number of products and whoever gets them first, walks away smiling and others just have to contend with other offers or look at other shops/sites. After all, we can’t expect a business to sell millions of 16GB pen drives for a loss of Rs. 300 each and nor can we expect a business to hold such a large inventory of pen drives or any other product.
What I do fault Flipkart with is the number of technical glitches they have been facing for past several days, ever since they subtly updated their website.
Anyone with even limited amount of experience of working with websites knows that it isn’t a good idea to roll out new design/feature when your website is expecting higher than usual traffic. Because new designs and features can and do have a negative impact on performance, and there are always glitches, which need to be vetted out.
Heck I had to use Flipkart App to complete my shopping, because their website wasn’t working properly and was throwing up errors, again and again. Even Flipkart’s Contact Us form wasn’t working properly throughout the day (I had to contact them, because track order page is showing different size of shirt than what I had ordered).
And at least for me, this was a bigger issue than lack of offers for my liking/needs.
Anyways, going forward I hope Flipkart would pay serious attention to their website and ensure such technical glitches do no occur during sale. At the same time, I really hope people realize that all deals are for limited stocks and if you do not act fast enough, then someone else will walk away with the offer you want.
Flipkart Billion Day Sale “Fiasco” is a post by Yogesh Sarkar
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