A month after Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale bombed, another leading e-commerce player, Snapdeal, faced consumers’ ire after its ‘Savings Day’ flash sale flopped. Snapdeal’s sale also coincided with Amazon.in’s sale, which was running mostly on its mobile application.

The Gurgaon-based Snapdeal’s flash sale kicked off on Tuesday without much fanfare at 7 am, offering huge discounts on mobile phones, apparels and consumer durables. But soon enough the social media was abuzz about the website’s crash.

@Renjith Regula wrote: “One more victim for the #BigSaleday #SnapdealSavingsDay trying to fool your own loyal customers don't they feel ashamed @snapdeal.”

Akhil Agarwal @agarwalakhil poked fun at Snapdeal asking, “Will @snapdeal say sorry tomorrow for #SnapdealSavingsDay? This was a reference to Flipkart’s apology to appease its dissatisfied customers for the goof up during its October 6 sale.

Snapdeal has not clarified on what went wrong. It also did not respond to an e-mail from BusinessLine till the time of going to press.

According to Ashish Jhalani, founder of consultancy firm E-Tailing India, e-commerce players are investing heavily without giving much importance to building a scalable infrastructure. “They are just realising the need, but will take time to implement.”

Even as Snapdeal and Amazon were running discounts to woo the over 200 million Indian shoppers (latest IAMAI figures), Alibaba was having its popular ‘Singles Day’, considered the world’s biggest online sales event comparable with the ‘Cyber Monday’ in the US.

Jack Ma-promoted Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce company by value and volume, mopped up a whopping $8 billion (₹48,000 crore) on Tuesday against $6 billion (₹36,000 crore) in this one-day event last year. India’s online retailing is expected to reach ₹50,000 crore by 2020.

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