India's biggest online retailer Flipkart turns into #Flopkart when it didn't go exactly as they planned since only a little percentage of online shoppers got to take advantage of what was known as their biggest online sale to date.
When the company announced their version of Black Friday (beginning of christmas shopping in the US following Thanksgiving Day) calling it Big Billion Day Sale, and offered huge discounts across a wide variety of their products, online customers rushed in to their site. This resulted into a crash in their servers. An error also occurred in their website telling the shoppers that the product they are trying to purchase is "out of stock."
Another issue that Flipkart addressed was the complaint of their customers saying their products were actually being sold at prices higher than other online retailers and that some items were marked up before the sale and then offered at discounts.
Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal personally apologized to their customers via email saying they were "really and truly sorry" for the glitch that happened. "Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. We failed to live up to this promise... and would like to apologize once again to every single customer for our failure," the email reads.
Amidst the bad news, Flipkart has announced that around 1.5 million online shoppers went to their site on Monday, and that they made a total of $100 million sales (6 billion rupies; £60 million), which was way above their target. They consider it as an extraordinary feat since a company doesn't achieve that in a day. They also "got a billion hits" that day alone.
The online retail company has a rapidly increasing market share against its competitors Snapdeal and Amazon. However, the recent incident caused their growing number of customers to switch and/or go back to their rivals
