Flipkarts Big Billion Day and related DOMAIN WARS!

[CyberKing]

ALERT: In anticipation of the much advertised Big Billion Day (India's a la Black Friday) shopping festival starting today ie, Oct 6th by FlipKart someone "shrewdly" registered BigBillionDay.com (who is data is cryptic and says something about GoDaddy auctions) on Oct 4th and the domain redirects to Amazon.IN !

Wow! Expect Legal Fireworks to begin this Diwali with all the turf war to grab the Indian Consumers E-Commerce Spend! With massive media coverage in every daily of this event and full page ads paid for by FlipKart and its partners, TVC running 24x7 this is a "celebration of ecommerce having arrived" for sure!

Flipkart The Big Billion Day - 6th October 2014, The Greatest Sale Ever - Flipkart.com

Find out: What's the Big Billion Day all about?

Here's what is in store at Flipkart's 'Big Billion Day' sale | Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis

Bansals strike a personal chord with Flipkart users | Business Standard News

 

[CyberKing]

My orders on SNAPDEAL.COM have been stuck each time they too are running an hourly promo and FlipKart absolutely sucks!


[h=1]Flipkart's Big Billion Day faces consumer backlash on social media[/h]Flipkart's Big Billion Day faces consumer backlash on social media | Business Standard News

 

[CyberKing]

More backlash -
[h=1]Flipkart crumbling on big billion day[/h]
Flipkart crumbling on big billion day : News, News - India Today

 

[CyberKing]

Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale over: You just don't know it yet!

Read more at:
Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale over: You just don't know it yet! - The Economic Times

Both the twitter handle bigbillionday and the domain bigbillionsale.com have since been registered - that is in addition to bigbillionsale.com which redirects to Amazon.IN

 

[CyberKing]

Oh its been listed on GoDaddy auctions for a buy it now price of USD 5000

Perhaps received a few thousand hits today and made money via Amazon affiliate programs (redirection):

https://in.auctions.godaddy.com/trpItemListing.aspx?miid=145236225

 

[CyberKing]

Interesting that the domain auction was "dropped"..

and media carries the news finally:

Did Amazon try to cleverly hijack Flipkart's 'big billion day' sale? | Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis

 

[CyberKing]

[h=1]Flipkart Big Billion Day Sales Top Rs. 600 Crores in 10 Hours[/h]
Flipkart Big Billion Day Sales Top Rs. 600 Crores in 10 Hours | NDTV Gadgets

 

[CyberKing]

The auction seems to be back on @ GoDaddy... the Media Might Be Jumping The Gun here:

[h=1]Amazon India trolls Flipkart by buying bigbillionday.com domain[/h]
Amazon India trolls Flipkart by buying bigbillionday.com domain : News, News - India Today


Did Amazon try to cleverly hijack Flipkart's 'big billion day' sale? | Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis


A spokesperson for Amazon India told BusinessLine, “We have not registered that domain.”

[h=1]When a Flipkart campaign leads to Amazon…[/h]When a Flipkart campaign leads to Amazon


This is an exciting day for eCommerce and Domains in India!

 

[CyberKing]

At around 5:30 PM IST - Flipkart's Admins woke up and registered a series of bigbilliondaydomains (at least those that were available)!

 

[Ace]

At around 5:30 PM IST - Flipkart's Admins woke up and registered a series of bigbilliondaydomains (at least those that were available)!

I wonder who bought the .in domain

 

[CyberKing]

The auction buy it now price for bigbillionday.com was upped to USD 9000 with 200+ views for the auction listing...meanwhile media continues to un-bashedly publish Amazon.IN being a troll!

 

[CyberKing]

and now this from "FLOPKART" , "FRAUDKART" or "DUMBKART" as they are now famously known....no gift coupon/voucher worth USD 10 even ??


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

 

[CyberKing]

The path to redemption is a long, hard one....after the blast, the crash, the backlash, some whiplash and plea in the form of an apology now comes some candy (possibly) - read today's mail:

Dear Customer,

Order ID: OD100942492828282828
Item: Whirlpool xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is regarding the email you received informing you that your order had been cancelled. We faced a few system glitches due to the overwhelming response on the Big Billion Day and are looking into it now.

Our aim is to deliver the item you had ordered or send you an even better product at the same price. We will inform you of the related details by 10th October. However, it may take us until 21st October to deliver the order to you.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for choosing to shop with us.

Yours in service,
Flipkart

I believe this entire post and its contents form a historic archive worth reflecting on in the future....this is a milestone in INDIA's e-commerce which is still an infant but growing up fast ...got me all nostalgic and reminded me of 1997-98 (pre dot com bust) and the early days ....