An Open Letter to the Flipkart founders: Big Billion Day!

It was the autumn of 2010, incidentally four years back exactly from today. Due to my strange habit of reading books around this time of the year, I ordered Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, which was my first order from flipkart. I was very much impressed by the discount, which amounted to some mere 150 bucks. I was so delighted with the purchase that flipkart became my first obvious choice while buying books. That was the start of my relation with your giant, flipkart.

Obviously, with the attractive nature of your website, I couldn’t resist but also shift my focus to some other products as well and hence, over the years, I was the proud owner of numerous items brought from your online store. My brother also bought a smartphone from flipkart, which he proudly regrets in doing so. Such was the obsession with flipkart that it made me and my brother, probably the laziest creatures on earth. And our obsession seemed to be heading to a new direction with the announcement of your Big Billion Day offer, seemingly with the huge amount of SMSes and e-mails which I received, informing me of the same. But I was gravely disappointed and angered by your publicity stunt, which looked good only in advertisement.

Due to my presence in a certain playground, playing football, I wasn’t able to be online at the start of your offer time, presumably at exactly 8 A.M, as you had so attractively advertised. When I returned home, my brother was sitting in front of the desktop, seemingly angry. As I gazed my eyes on the screen, I saw ‘Sold Out’ was being highlighted in most of the products. Probably, it was sold out because the time was around 9. But, I was informed by my brother that the ‘Sold Out’ decoration was there since 8, as he had already braced himself from the beginning. Added to that, most of the offers seemed so non-sense. Now, my complaint to you is that: why was the necessity of your publicity stunt? What made you advertise your so-called big sales with insane offers, like pricing the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 at around 1500 bucks, which made me greedy as hell as it obviously read ‘Sold Out’? And who sells pen drives and mixer blenders (single-handed ones) at Re 1? Even if those prices didn’t seem legitimate, I don’t know if they were actually available. And I doubt any person has got hold on to those deals as they read ‘Sold Out’ from the beginning itself, as I was informed by many friends of mine. Also, throughout the morning, your site had unexpected crash downs every time I placed an order. That wasn't what I was expecting from flipkart. Thanks to it, I couldn't buy a single item on your 'Big Billion Day'. My faith in your website had already decreased during the ‘flash sales’ strategy you used for selling out the Xiaomi smart phones, which were so modestly priced at 6K. And every time, I logged in to buy, after registering myself, I was smartly welcomed with an ‘Out of Stock’ banner within milliseconds to the start of the sales or I receive an unexpected error from the site. I was so angry, I decided not to buy that Chinese phone, altogether. To hell with China and to hell with your partnership with Xiaomi. I know that since your inception in 2007, you have reached unreachable heights in the e-commerce trade, even though amazon.com is a distant dream, considering the world market. It is still an unsolved theory as to why so many IIT-ians these days are diverting themselves from their core path of engineering. But I  do appreciate your dedication towards building this venture and making us even more lazier than before. Flipkart has really revolutionized e-commerce in our country and has actually made things easily accessible, especially books. But my advice to you is that don’t jeopardize your brand value by making a fool out of people. It was a very selfish idea to advertise such a disappointing ‘sales’ in such a humongous manner without the proper maintenance of your website with unexpected errors. Also, we, Indians, no doubt love things to be available at freakingly low cost, but that shouldn’t mean that you promise to sell pen-drives at Re 1. The 6^th of October may have diverted an extremely huge  and uncontrollable amount of traffic to your website, but it surely broke down the hearts of many Indians, including this blogger. Besides being founders of Flipkart, and sharing a common surname, you two may not be brothers, but you must never underestimate the feelings of two brothers. Read, me and my brother.

So, until my next order, be happy ‘planning your next marketing strategy’.