In response to the criticism on social media on Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Day’ sale, the e-commerce giant sent an e-mail on Tuesday to its subscribers accepting their mistakes for most of the problems encountered by buyers on Monday’s mega sale. The long mail signed by Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal could be summarised by saying, ?We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry.?
The email from Flipkart accepted that problems did rise up for buyers on Monday and then tried to explain the reasons behind each one of them. Company also mentions that ‘an unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday and it is clear that the company was clearly not prepared to manage such high demand.
Apart from products going out-of-stock or other technical issues, Flipkart has tried to explain or ‘manage’ the issue of marked-up prices in its e-email to subscribers, however, it did not provide a proper reason for the price changes, at least.
Here we present excerpts from the e-mail sent by Flipkart to its subscribers and the reasons why things went wrong:
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.
The e-mail humbly ends by saying, ?Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer’s trust and faith.?
After the criticism, this is the least Flipkart could have done.