[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://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100...

http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in...

[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.

[yogeshkhatri]

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.

This happened to me https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4697507053002&set=a....

Article on cancelling of orders on DNA http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-flipkart-cancels-order-...

[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)?

[rasz_pl]

except those stories tell you those prices are FICTION and your order will get cancelled

[balladeer]

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 :-)

[hrjet]

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.

[balladeer]

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.

[amrrs]

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.

[balladeer]

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.

[piyush_soni]

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.

[webbrahmin]

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

[denzil_correa]

> 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.

[chdir]

> 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.

[saanilb]

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

[gumshuda]

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.

[chdir]

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.

[saanilb]

many sellers are happy, one article from nextbigwhat

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