Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

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.<p>#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 &#x27;sale&#x27; on Flipkart, the non-sale prices on Amazon and Snapdeal were lower than Flipkart&#x27;s &#x27;discounted&#x27; prices. All in all, a terrible PR nightmare for Flipkart.<p>Some coverage in Indian media and blogs:<p><a href="http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-mocks-flipkarts-big-billion-day-festive-sale-236751.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech.firstpost.com&#x2F;news-analysis&#x2F;flopkart-twitter-moc...</a><p><a href="http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100-mn-sales-how-flipkarts-big-billion-day-developed-103291.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstbiz.firstpost.com&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;from-flopkart-to-100...</a><p><a href="http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in-one-bigbillionday/39017.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moneylife.in&#x2F;article&#x2F;from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in...</a>

For readers who aren&#x27;t from India and wondering about the &quot;festive season&quot;, 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.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vijayadashami</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diwali</a>

I just received a well-crafted apology email &quot;from the founders&quot; (I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s &quot;on behalf of&quot; instead of &quot;from&quot;, but I might be wrong about that). It&#x27;s interesting because it&#x27;s quite long and aims to cover all of the problems that led to their failures yesterday.<p>The email to me communicates that they were just completely ill-prepared, which doesn&#x27;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.<p>For those that don&#x27;t have access to the email itself, I&#x27;ve dumped it in a Gist [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;kartikkumar&#x2F;486208fa7aa3913b8932</a>

Yesterday was <i>flopkart</i> not <i>flipkart</i>. 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 <i>amazon</i> than the <i>flipkart</i>&#x27;s big billion day.

<a href="http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-bansals-say-were-sorry-after-outrage-over-big-billion-day-103586.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstbiz.firstpost.com&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;full-text-flipkarts-...</a> - Apology from Flipkart

To put that in perspective, if Flipkart has sales of $100M <i>every</i> day of the year, at $36.5 billion, it would be half of Amazon&#x27;s e-commerce revenue of $67.9 billion [0].<p>[0] <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;amazon-sales-chart&#x2F;</a>

Isn&#x27;t Amazon.in the Amazon of India?

I am a little bit proud that they use a framework I was involved in for a while: Padrino<p><a href="https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;YogiKulkarni&#x2F;status&#x2F;183576477953036288</a>

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.

This article has a few details on why this week was important for e-commerce sites in India: <a href="http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-websites-are-at-each-others-throats-this-week/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;274278&#x2F;the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-web...</a><p>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.<p>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.

Alibaba sales $5.78 billion in 2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;11.

As we more westernised in our outlook, bigbillionday is something similar to &quot;Black Friday&quot; 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&#x27;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.

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.

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

Is that $100m USD or the Indian Rupee?

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