Myntra gives consumers a taste of traditional retail

Fashion e-tailer queues up buyers for its 2-day sale

Online shopping turned into a traditional purchase experience for several buyers on Saturday morning as they queued up to enter fashion e-tailer Myntra’s website.

Having learnt from parent Flipkart’s mistakes, Myntra allowed a limited number of users on its website to ensure a smooth experience for consumers during its two-day End of Reason Sale, which started at 8 am on Saturday.

“Please wait. Your shopping will begin shortly,” the web page restricting entry into Myntra stated. “Our store is full of shoppers and our systems are operating at maximum capacity. We are trying our best to sneak you in. Please check back in a few minutes to shop at India’s biggest fashion sale!”

’MYNTRA’ FOR SUCCESS?

• Myntra allowed only a limited number of users on its website at each time, to ensure a smooth experience for consumers during its two-day End of Reason Sale
• The new feature helped Myntra tame technical glitches but customers took to social media to voice concerns as waiting period for some stretched to over 30 minutes
• Myntra also announced a shutdown for the website for a few hours before the sale began, in order to get time to prepare for the event
• It seems to have also hedged itself against extremely heavy traffic by spreading the sale over two days, consumers observed

Even as the new feature helped Myntra in taming technical glitches, several customers took to social media to voice their concerns as the wait for some stretched to over 30 minutes.

“If I wanted to wait, I would be out in a store, this defeats the very essence of online shopping,” said a post by a consumer on micro-blogging website Twitter earlier on Saturday.

The negative comments on social media for Myntra’s ongoing sale were, however, far fewer than the flak Flipkart had drawn during its ‘Big Billion Day’ sale in October. The poster boy of Indian e-commerce faced a slew of issues during the one-day event, including technical glitches and stocks running out. Unable to manage the traffic, Flipkart’s servers crashed repeatedly through the day. Flipkart founders, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related), eventually apologised to consumers.

Besides queuing up, Myntra announced a website shutdown for a few hours before the sale to prepare for the event. This was also a lesson from Flipkart, which was criticised for inconsistencies in pricing just before the beginning of the ‘Big Billion Day’. The company had later said these were due to manual errors.

Myntra also hedged itself against heavy traffic by spreading the sale over two days. With the event running through the weekend, buyers would not be in a rush in the first few hours of the sale, consumers said.

Despite a better management, Myntra’s sale was not devoid of technical issues as  orders on the website took a couple of hours to be processed. Many buyers complained of not receiving a confirmation email for several hours.

A Myntra spokesperson said there was a little delay in processing of orders for some hours, however, that was restored later in the day.

While the event was planned to be a two-day affair, in a message to consumers on late Saturday evening, Myntra said “due to overwhelming response, we are fast running out of stock on most offers. End of Reason Sale will probably end at 11 pm tonight. Grab offers till they last.”