
Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day - taurussai
http://www.livemint.com/Industry/TM8tDvrv3OfeYjeXkEPXZI/Flipkart-hits-100-million-sales-target-in-10-hours.html
======
bgdam
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.

Some coverage in Indian media and blogs:

[http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-
moc...](http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-mocks-
flipkarts-big-billion-day-festive-sale-236751.html)

[http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-
to-100...](http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100-mn-
sales-how-flipkarts-big-billion-day-developed-103291.html)

[http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-
in...](http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in-one-
bigbillionday/39017.html)

~~~
bilalhusain
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.

~~~
bgdam
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.

~~~
Sven7
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.

~~~
bgdam
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)?

------
denzil_correa
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.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali)

------
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](https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932)

------
_navaneethan
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.

------
akbarnama
[http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-
flipkarts-...](http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-
bansals-say-were-sorry-after-outrage-over-big-billion-day-103586.html) \-
Apology from Flipkart

------
amitutk
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].

[0] [http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-
chart/](http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/)

~~~
shklnrj
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.

------
mrweasel
Isn't Amazon.in the Amazon of India?

~~~
chdir
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.

~~~
vidyesh
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.

~~~
amrrs
You know the founder of Amazon India is not an Indian but Flipkart's founders
are Indians (born and living in India).

~~~
vidyesh
And do you know they worked for Amazon.com for few years to bring that model
back to Indian market?

------
Argorak
I am a little bit proud that they use a framework I was involved in for a
while: Padrino

[https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288](https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288)

------
saanilb
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.

------
suprgeek
This 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...](http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-websites-are-
at-each-others-throats-this-week/)

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.

~~~
avemuri
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.

~~~
piyush_soni
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.

------
haosdent
Alibaba sales $5.78 billion in 2013/11/11.

~~~
kopparam
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.

------
appreneur
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.

~~~
Sven7
Indeed, getting Indians to move from buying gold for no good reason to buying
garbage for no good reason = progress to first world status.

~~~
appreneur
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..

------
amolgupta
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.

------
virens
How many orders got cancelled by Flipkart out of these $100M?

------
source99
Is that $100m USD or the Indian Rupee?

~~~
shekhar101
It's USD. A big deal I would say.

------
sidcool
They had this huge campaign in news about the Billion sale. They really had
good offers. I myself bought shoes and apparel.

