I am sure they weren't deliberately tricking the customers, instead it is their incompetence and immaturity showing up. They couldn't handle the commotion and steps taken to handle the load backfired (A completely made up example can be that they started the crashed servers but in panic forgot to apply the discount configuration). Disclosure: I worked at Flipkart. I felt that employees are immature.

> Reports are now coming in that most people who managed to actually buy something at bargain prices had their orders cancelled by Flipkart.

I can confirm this from multiple sources. The orders were cancelled citing "allowing other customers a fair opportunity" . Some people are mulling over legal options including a litigation to regulate such e-commerce malpractices.

Apology mail from Flipkart

Dear Customer,

Yesterday was a big day for us. And we really wanted it to be a great day for you. But at the end of the day, we know that your experience was less than pleasant. We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry.

It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.

And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. We didn't source enough products and deals in advance to cater to your requirements. To add to this, the load on our server led to intermittent outages, further impacting your shopping experience on our site.

An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.

And this is not acceptable to us.

Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. Yesterday, we failed that trust. We have learnt some valuable lessons from this and have started working doubly hard to address all the issues that cropped up during this sale.

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.

Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.

Thank you. Sachin and Binny

Still they sold items of more than $100 million and thats what we are discussing. Some items were cheaper on other sites in festive season but that doesn't make it a flop. Also they didn't inflate MRP just removed discount on few items slowly and added it back on sale day.Though they did give great discounts on most of the categories and items .I don't understand what is wrong with that. They wanted people to buy items online and they were successful in doing that.

many sellers are happy, one article from nextbigwhat

http://www.nextbigwhat.com/flipkart-seller-feedback-marketpl...

I think you are looking at it from the economy perspective at current time. But in the long term, Indian market is going to grow and others are not going to grow at similar pace. The magic is in compound interest.

also, Amazon is available in lot of countries, whereas Flipkart is essentially India only. Over that, there is the currency and per capita differences.

To some extent, Flipkart.com:India::Amazon.com:USA is more accurate than Amazon.in:India::Amazon.com:USA.

Amazon.in is following a purely marketplace model i.e. only 3rd party sellers (which is unlike the Amazon we know in US). Whereas Flipkart has a large percentage of stuff offered by 'WS Retail', which is essentially Flikart itself.

Was about to comment same line. Just to add: Most of the products @ Amazon.in were cheaper than Flipkart even after discounts .

I've been a 11 year customer of Amazon US and a 2 year customer at Amazon.in. They certainly do get Indian culture. Amazon India isn't a bunch of white people from Seattle arriving en masse and setting up shop. They hired locally (including from Indian incumbents) and localized their operations to include stuff like COD, local language support etc. Amazon is well on its way to becoming as 'local' as McDonalds or Honda have already. Their capability to deliver in Tier II and III cities is already ahead of Flipkart for example. GMV is currently about 35% of Flipkart and I wouldn't be surprised if they overtook them in two years.

"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."

What do you think are the barriers to utilizing large scale distributed technology platforms? I personally don't think this is a cultural thing.

The scale of China can't be matched by any other single country. But considering India's past and present, this is the largest ever e-commerce sale pulled off by it's own local company which is a giant leap in it's struggling economy.

To me, what's happening in India e-commerce growth is just extension or expansion of Amazon model, on a bigger scale perhaps.

But for Alibaba, it is truly revolutionary if you look at how much of their Tmall sales percentage(relative to taobao) in that $5.78 billion sales, it is truly manufacturer-to-consumer.

Indeed, getting Indians to move from buying gold for no good reason to buying garbage for no good reason = progress to first world status.

".....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians."

It sounds so easy when you put it like that. Thank you :)

It's USD. A big deal I would say.