Big Billion Days: Flipkart sells 1 mn units in 10 hours

Customers complained of difficulties around placing orders and the app not working

Flipkart claimed it sold a million units in the first 10 hours of its five-day ‘Big Billion Days’ sale, though users reported crash of the mobile app when the sale began early on Wednesday.

“With six million visits from across the nation, we saw 25 items sold per second. Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai emerged as the chart toppers in terms of visits from metro cities, and Ludhiana, Lucknow and Bhopal from the non-metro cities,” the company said.

It added that footwear, men’s clothing and accessories have been top selling categories. “It is great to see 1.6 million app installs in the past two days — that shows India had been preparing well for the event,” Mukesh Bansal, head of commerce platform, said.

However, months of planning, expensive tech teams, brand new warehouses and a 16,000 strong delivery base could not prevent technical glitches the app faced and the jinx continued for the second year in a row.

In the first few minutes of the sale, Flipkart’s app struggled to cope up with the heavy traffic. Irate customers took to social media website Twitter to vent their frustration. Customers complained of difficulties around placing orders, products being sold out and the app not working. However, Flipkart defended the sale and said that the technical glitch lasted for just a few minutes.

“Barring the minor glitch in the beginning for a few minutes, the event has been flawless. There is a stream of encouraging and positive feedback from our customers through social media channels and our internal research shows that over 80 percent of the customer sentiment has been extremely positive. We are on our way to set new benchmarks in the Indian e-commerce industry,” a spokesperson said.

Last year, Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal had to apologise to customers cancelling orders, pushing up prices, and glitches in the Flipkart website during the company’s annual, much-hyped Big Billion Day sale.

US online marketplace major Amazon also launched its ‘Great Indian Festive Sale’ on Tuesday. The sale went smoothly. Though the company pushed its customers to use its app with offers and prizes the sale was conducted on both the website and the app. The company said this year the basket size would increase significantly with customers buying at all price points.