10 ms·

Flipkart, Amazon of India, has sales of $100M in one day

107 points by taurussai 12y ago

amitutk 12y ago
To put that in perspective, if Flipkart has sales of $100M every day of the year, at $36.5 billion, it would be half of Amazon's e-commerce revenue of $67.9 billion [0]. [0] http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/ http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/
- shklnrj 12y ago
  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.
- rikacomet 12y ago
  also, Amazon is available in lot of countries, whereas Flipkart is essentially India only. Over that, there is the currency and per capita differences.
bgdam 12y ago
Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than normal prices. Reports are now coming in that most people who managed to actually buy something at bargain prices had their orders cancelled by Flipkart. #Flopkart was trending on twitter through the entire day. Flipkart called this sale the Big Billion Day, and somebody registered bigbillionday.com and redirected it to amazon.in. Also for most items that were on 'sale' on Flipkart, the non-sale prices on Amazon and Snapdeal were lower than Flipkart's 'discounted' prices. All in all, a terrible PR nightmare for Flipkart. Some coverage in Indian media and blogs: http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-mocks-flipkarts-big-billion-day-festive-sale-236751.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-moc... http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100-mn-sales-how-flipkarts-big-billion-day-developed-103291.html http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100... http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in-one-bigbillionday/39017.html http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in...
- bilalhusain 12y ago
  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.
  - balladeer 12y ago
    They actually were deliberately tricking the customers. They are known for doing this. Actually Amazon.in is hitting them hard with excellent and transparent pricing, great customer service (at least from Indian standards) and that is making them desperate. Source: I've been a customer for years and have been watching them closely :-)
    - amrrs 12y ago
      And though users are frustrated, they've tasted this huge volume success with Xiaomi so it doesn't take much for them to repeat the same #FlashSale across their product category.
      - balladeer 12y ago
        Exactly. Initially I thought Xiaomi/Flipkart were genuinely selling whatever phones they could make for India. But when the numbers started to come in then I realise, shit it was just marketing gimmick.
    - hrjet 12y ago
      I have seen Amazon.in silently adding prices during checkout (deliberate or not I can't say ofcourse). I haven't experienced Flipkart adding prices during checkout, but the prices do fluctuate while browsing over the span of a day.
      - balladeer 12y ago
suprgeek 12y ago
This article has a few details on why this week was important for e-commerce sites in India: http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-websites-are-at-each-others-throats-this-week/ http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-web... 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. I boldly (and somewhat foolishly) predict that as more and more Indians get online, get comfortable with spending online, there will be a huge wave of India focused sites that will become the next Billion dollar companies.
- rpm33 12y ago
  "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.
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    The and separates two independent clauses.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- avemuri 12y ago
  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.
_navaneethan 12y ago
Yesterday was flopkart not flipkart. Even I wanted to buy some offers in flipkart deliberately. But eventually, i ended up buying the same thing in Amazon.in. Since, the price of the thing is lower in amazon than the flipkart's big billion day.
haosdent 12y ago
Alibaba sales $5.78 billion in 2013/11/11.
- kopparam 12y ago
  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.
- yusiang 12y ago
  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.
appreneur 12y ago
As we more westernised in our outlook, bigbillionday is something similar to "Black Friday" and deep discount on single day ....might do more for overall internet penetration....currently only 25% of Indians have access to Internet, which stands at 243 million , if this crosses to 340 million, That's a huge market growth of Internet users ...this will in the long term benefit everybody.....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians.
- gnurag 12y ago
  ".....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians." It sounds so easy when you put it like that. Thank you :)
  - appreneur 12y ago
    Yes it's the antidote for our poorest of the poor 200 million Indians...hope internet penetration removes that many Indians out of poverty...it's possible and most likely solution.
- Sven7 12y ago
  Indeed, getting Indians to move from buying gold for no good reason to buying garbage for no good reason = progress to first world status.
  - appreneur 12y ago
    I am just making point of "explosive growth of internet" might be the beneficiary ....in the process we might become more westernised...I don't mind that as long as it can remove poverty of 500 million Indians.....more than 200 million people live in abject poverty( poorest of the poor)...Internet penetration is known to uplift most people out of abject poverty...wish more Indians are online ...and the world will come and invest big billions...imagine both Europe+Usa = india market size..it's possible...but it takes effort and discipline..
sidcool 12y ago
They had this huge campaign in news about the Billion sale. They really had good offers. I myself bought shoes and apparel.
mrweasel 12y ago
Isn't Amazon.in the Amazon of India?
- linux_devil 12y ago
  Was about to comment same line. Just to add: Most of the products @ Amazon.in were cheaper than Flipkart even after discounts .
- chdir 12y ago
  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.
  - vidyesh 12y ago
    Technically Flipkart isn't a Indian company as Flipkart is registered in SG. But since all its operations are in India you could say it serves India. Just like amazon.in which serves India. WS Retail is now a separate entity not run by Flipkart anymore. It was sold last year. This was mainly to bypass the FDI laws. So WS Retail is like a wholesaler. So WS Retail is a seller technically. Also you cannot say they run on different models, Flipkart does have more than a one seller so the model is still the same as amazon. Flipkart just eats other sellers at times with the WS Retailer's discounts and stuff. Just like amazon? If every legal aspect is off the table then Flipkart is running WS Retail and other sellers are at mercy of Flipkart's(WS Retail) listing price. Also Amazon.in sellers are all Indian (brick and mortar stores)sellers, so theres that.
    - amrrs 12y ago
      You know the founder of Amazon India is not an Indian but Flipkart's founders are Indians (born and living in India).
      - 12y ago
source99 12y ago
Is that $100m USD or the Indian Rupee?
- shekhar101 12y ago
  It's USD. A big deal I would say.
denzil_correa 12y ago
For readers who aren't from India and wondering about the "festive season", the Indian festive season is different from US. The festive season is generally considered the period between two festivals Dussehra (triumph of good over evil) [0] and Diwali (festival of lights) [1]. In 2014, the Dussehra and Diwali fall on 4th October and 23rd October, respectively. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali
Argorak 12y ago
I am a little bit proud that they use a framework I was involved in for a while: Padrino https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288 https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288
saanilb 12y ago
Flipkart heavily advertised for the campaign, spent lots of money. Also steep discounts for the products helped them to increase the top line. Amazon India got good mileage even though they havent planned much.
amolgupta 12y ago
Apart from all the complaints about how the whole thing was managed,this marks as one big day for the e-com industry in the country. A lot of people had their first online purchange experience.A big step to target the next billion users maybe.
virens 12y ago
How many orders got cancelled by Flipkart out of these $100M?
kartikkumar 12y ago
I just received a well-crafted apology email "from the founders" (I'm guessing it's "on behalf of" instead of "from", but I might be wrong about that). It's interesting because it's quite long and aims to cover all of the problems that led to their failures yesterday. The email to me communicates that they were just completely ill-prepared, which doesn't bode well for a company with growth aspirations. In a highly competitive environment, I can appreciate their frankness about the problems that they faced, but in truth, each one of them should have been tackled BEFORE planning such an event. None of the problems can be considered a surprise, and I think that they will have to do a lot more damage limitation to get consumers to trust their operations. For those that don't have access to the email itself, I've dumped it in a Gist [1]. [1] https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932 https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932
akbarnama 12y ago
http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-bansals-say-were-sorry-after-outrage-over-big-billion-day-103586.html http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-... - Apology from Flipkart

107 points by taurussai 12y ago

To put that in perspective, if Flipkart has sales of $100M every day of the year, at $36.5 billion, it would be half of Amazon's e-commerce revenue of $67.9 billion [0]. [0] http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/ http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/amazon-sales-chart/

shklnrj 12y ago
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.
rikacomet 12y ago
also, Amazon is available in lot of countries, whereas Flipkart is essentially India only. Over that, there is the currency and per capita differences.

bgdam 12y ago

Most of the offers were sold out within seconds of the sale start, the servers kept crashing intermittently, items mysteriously disappeared from the cart just before payment, prices shown on the product page were silently increased when added to the cart, and to top it all off people managed to get screenshots of prices being raised to near 200% before a discount was applied and the items were sold for higher than normal prices. Reports are now coming in that most people who managed to actually buy something at bargain prices had their orders cancelled by Flipkart. #Flopkart was trending on twitter through the entire day. Flipkart called this sale the Big Billion Day, and somebody registered bigbillionday.com and redirected it to amazon.in. Also for most items that were on 'sale' on Flipkart, the non-sale prices on Amazon and Snapdeal were lower than Flipkart's 'discounted' prices. All in all, a terrible PR nightmare for Flipkart. Some coverage in Indian media and blogs: http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-mocks-flipkarts-big-billion-day-festive-sale-236751.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/flopkart-twitter-moc... http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100-mn-sales-how-flipkarts-big-billion-day-developed-103291.html http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/from-flopkart-to-100... http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in-one-bigbillionday/39017.html http://www.moneylife.in/article/from-flipkart-to-flopkart-in...

bilalhusain 12y ago
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.
- balladeer 12y ago
  They actually were deliberately tricking the customers. They are known for doing this. Actually Amazon.in is hitting them hard with excellent and transparent pricing, great customer service (at least from Indian standards) and that is making them desperate. Source: I've been a customer for years and have been watching them closely :-)
  - amrrs 12y ago
    And though users are frustrated, they've tasted this huge volume success with Xiaomi so it doesn't take much for them to repeat the same #FlashSale across their product category.
    - balladeer 12y ago
      Exactly. Initially I thought Xiaomi/Flipkart were genuinely selling whatever phones they could make for India. But when the numbers started to come in then I realise, shit it was just marketing gimmick.
  - hrjet 12y ago
    I have seen Amazon.in silently adding prices during checkout (deliberate or not I can't say ofcourse). I haven't experienced Flipkart adding prices during checkout, but the prices do fluctuate while browsing over the span of a day.
    - balladeer 12y ago

suprgeek 12y ago

This article has a few details on why this week was important for e-commerce sites in India: http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-websites-are-at-each-others-throats-this-week/ http://qz.com/274278/the-real-reason-why-indias-shopping-web... 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. I boldly (and somewhat foolishly) predict that as more and more Indians get online, get comfortable with spending online, there will be a huge wave of India focused sites that will become the next Billion dollar companies.

rpm33 12y ago
"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.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  The and separates two independent clauses.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
avemuri 12y ago
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.

_navaneethan 12y ago

Yesterday was flopkart not flipkart. Even I wanted to buy some offers in flipkart deliberately. But eventually, i ended up buying the same thing in Amazon.in. Since, the price of the thing is lower in amazon than the flipkart's big billion day.

haosdent 12y ago

Alibaba sales $5.78 billion in 2013/11/11.

kopparam 12y ago
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.
yusiang 12y ago
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.

appreneur 12y ago

As we more westernised in our outlook, bigbillionday is something similar to "Black Friday" and deep discount on single day ....might do more for overall internet penetration....currently only 25% of Indians have access to Internet, which stands at 243 million , if this crosses to 340 million, That's a huge market growth of Internet users ...this will in the long term benefit everybody.....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians.

gnurag 12y ago
".....perhaps remove poverty of more than 500 million Indians." It sounds so easy when you put it like that. Thank you :)
- appreneur 12y ago
  Yes it's the antidote for our poorest of the poor 200 million Indians...hope internet penetration removes that many Indians out of poverty...it's possible and most likely solution.
Sven7 12y ago
Indeed, getting Indians to move from buying gold for no good reason to buying garbage for no good reason = progress to first world status.
- appreneur 12y ago
  I am just making point of "explosive growth of internet" might be the beneficiary ....in the process we might become more westernised...I don't mind that as long as it can remove poverty of 500 million Indians.....more than 200 million people live in abject poverty( poorest of the poor)...Internet penetration is known to uplift most people out of abject poverty...wish more Indians are online ...and the world will come and invest big billions...imagine both Europe+Usa = india market size..it's possible...but it takes effort and discipline..

sidcool 12y ago

They had this huge campaign in news about the Billion sale. They really had good offers. I myself bought shoes and apparel.

mrweasel 12y ago

Isn't Amazon.in the Amazon of India?

linux_devil 12y ago
Was about to comment same line. Just to add: Most of the products @ Amazon.in were cheaper than Flipkart even after discounts .
chdir 12y ago
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.
- vidyesh 12y ago
  Technically Flipkart isn't a Indian company as Flipkart is registered in SG. But since all its operations are in India you could say it serves India. Just like amazon.in which serves India. WS Retail is now a separate entity not run by Flipkart anymore. It was sold last year. This was mainly to bypass the FDI laws. So WS Retail is like a wholesaler. So WS Retail is a seller technically. Also you cannot say they run on different models, Flipkart does have more than a one seller so the model is still the same as amazon. Flipkart just eats other sellers at times with the WS Retailer's discounts and stuff. Just like amazon? If every legal aspect is off the table then Flipkart is running WS Retail and other sellers are at mercy of Flipkart's(WS Retail) listing price. Also Amazon.in sellers are all Indian (brick and mortar stores)sellers, so theres that.
  - amrrs 12y ago
    You know the founder of Amazon India is not an Indian but Flipkart's founders are Indians (born and living in India).
    - 12y ago

source99 12y ago

Is that $100m USD or the Indian Rupee?

shekhar101 12y ago
It's USD. A big deal I would say.

denzil_correa 12y ago

For readers who aren't from India and wondering about the "festive season", the Indian festive season is different from US. The festive season is generally considered the period between two festivals Dussehra (triumph of good over evil) [0] and Diwali (festival of lights) [1]. In 2014, the Dussehra and Diwali fall on 4th October and 23rd October, respectively. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali

Argorak 12y ago

I am a little bit proud that they use a framework I was involved in for a while: Padrino https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288 https://twitter.com/YogiKulkarni/status/183576477953036288

saanilb 12y ago

Flipkart heavily advertised for the campaign, spent lots of money. Also steep discounts for the products helped them to increase the top line. Amazon India got good mileage even though they havent planned much.

amolgupta 12y ago

Apart from all the complaints about how the whole thing was managed,this marks as one big day for the e-com industry in the country. A lot of people had their first online purchange experience.A big step to target the next billion users maybe.

virens 12y ago

How many orders got cancelled by Flipkart out of these $100M?

kartikkumar 12y ago

I just received a well-crafted apology email "from the founders" (I'm guessing it's "on behalf of" instead of "from", but I might be wrong about that). It's interesting because it's quite long and aims to cover all of the problems that led to their failures yesterday. The email to me communicates that they were just completely ill-prepared, which doesn't bode well for a company with growth aspirations. In a highly competitive environment, I can appreciate their frankness about the problems that they faced, but in truth, each one of them should have been tackled BEFORE planning such an event. None of the problems can be considered a surprise, and I think that they will have to do a lot more damage limitation to get consumers to trust their operations. For those that don't have access to the email itself, I've dumped it in a Gist [1]. [1] https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932 https://gist.github.com/kartikkumar/486208fa7aa3913b8932

akbarnama 12y ago

http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-bansals-say-were-sorry-after-outrage-over-big-billion-day-103586.html http://firstbiz.firstpost.com/corporate/full-text-flipkarts-... - Apology from Flipkart