Flash Sales by Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon and Why they went wrong!

Flipkart organized its Big Billion day on the 6th of October which got millions of people looking forward to buying things on large discounted rate but to say most were disappointed. Lets not hope that Snapdeal would also do the same. Oh. by the way! SnapDeal also had its Saving Day on 11th of November, 2014.

As you can see from the above image, the sale has started by 7 A.M and with each hour going by, new products were offered on discount rates. The categories of items are Electronics, Fashion and Home. Electronics categories has various sub categories which includes items like Mobiles, Home appliances like Mixer Grinder, Food processor and so on. Hard disks worth of GBs of storage (1TB and 2TB) are offered at 60% discount.

What do you have to know?

There were lots of complaint against Flipkart during its Big Billion day as some people say that the prices were first hiked and then Flipkart offered a discount on the prices. The sale started at 8 am when pen drives were offered at Re. 1, but were out of stock almost immediately. The buyers were angered by this act. So will the Snapdeal sale be like that as well? Yes, it kind of was! The checkout pages did not load properly, the homepage itself was blank due to high traffic and the discounted products were not to be seen!

These put a question on your face – Should you buy at flash sales? Is this like waiting to book a ticket in IRCTC?

But why today?

Why is today special? Why did Snapdeal choose this day? That is because there is a reason. Today is called the Single’s Day wherein huge flash sales are put across all over China. So, following the same trend, Snapdeal  has also put up its flash sale. Ad another thing that we have to know is, Amazon has also put up its Appiness Sale (without any ads).

As you see from the above image, there are a lot of 1s which is why today is a very significant day.

Why Flipkart’s Sale went Wrong?

There are many reasons as to why their sale went wrong The first thing is wrong planning. If they wanted to celebrate a big flash sale, then they must have had sufficient servers ready. This would have made sure that the crashes weren’t happening frequently. Some orders were cancelled after a time being after the orders were placed due to stock issues.

Some of the good things were Small items like Cufflinks were available free of cost (worth Rs 1100 each). And prices of most items were below their original rate on the site and they were given “real discounts”. The only down to this were the shipping times which took longer than usual. If an item ships by 2-4 business days, these items shipped by around 8-10 days. So which again takes me back to my stock issues point.

Here is an Apology by Flipkart:

If you had ordered from Flipkart, you would have got this message in your mail. But if you haven’t. Do enjoy this. So what do you have to say about flash sales becoming the trend nowadays? Tell us in the comments below.