Every year, thanksgiving sale in the United States is driven
by long sleepless queues, bulk shopping and a literal loot of stores offering
great discounts. Many immigrants decide to shop for the annual wishlist during
such sales and literally the entire racks are emptied to the shopping carts. It’s
a different issue that these goods make their way to ebay and best deals
websites. To give Indians a flavor of this historic day, Flipkart introduced
the big billion day on 6th October. The date signifies the flat
number when the Bansal brother started Flipkart(610) . To what would would have
been the biggest marketing event of the decade became a PR nightmare for the
duo. Deals were available for Rs.1 and most of the discounts were at 50-80%
category. Deals were updated frequently
and everywhere hour and were bought by people in 2-3 minutes of starting the
sale. The rivals were not silent.Snapdeal came up with similar prices to tackle
the sales and attracted the audience. Things started to go wrong when the
servers crashed, people kept trying for better deals and technology was the
biggest barrier for flipkart. Apart from this, there were complaints about
incorrect pricing and fake checkouts by people – this was because with the best
internet connection also, deals were over by the time they reached the cart. An
interesting way how Amazon demonstrated its sale was to show the number of
units that have been blocked hence the users wouldn’t spend time if they know
that the product has very low probability to be obtained.
