A day after its Big Billion Day sales, the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart on Tuesday apologised to consumers for the glitches they encountered while shopping on its site.

In a letter to customers, Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal said: “We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry.”

The Bangalore-based company had organised a mega sales campaign with up to 90 per cent discounts on Monday, but the site hit technical snags in the wake of heavy traffic.

The company claims that about 1.5 million people shopped on its website on Monday and it achieved the revenue target of ₹600 crore in just 10 hours. The Flipkart site also got one billion hits during the day, it says. But not all consumers are happy.

“We typically get around 1,000 complaints daily for e-commerce players. However, yesterday (Monday), the volume shot up to 2,500, in large part due to Flipkart’s Big Billion Day. We expect more complaints to flow in the coming week,” says Ankur Singla, Founder and CEO of Akosha, an online consumer complaint forum.

The consumers questioned the discounts offered. Many complained that their orders got cancelled post-purchase, order confirmation SMS/emails were not received and there were discrepancies between the advertised price versus the actual price. Several items were being sold at ₹1.

This was not the first time that Flipkart had disappointed its consumers. The company faced similar technical problems during the launch of Moto G and Xiaomi earlier after which consumers took it to social media accusing the company of fraud and creating hype to drive up traffic to its site.

Industry experts say e-commerce companies should keep customer experience in mind while planning such discounts-led customer acquisition strategy. The customers coming to the sites during such sales are deal hunters and cannot be turned into loyal customers, they add.

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