A day before Flipkart's ‘Big Saving Days’ sale, customers faced difficulties in placing their orders. At around 5 pm on Friday, most of the items across categories on the e-commerce platform were showing out of stock.
“I was surprised initially and then disappointed. I thought adding products to my Flipkart shopping cart would ensure I could check out faster when the sale began,” said Pratiksha (name changed) a customer of Flipkart. “In the past, I had experienced difficulty during the final payment process or even while searching for products, which I wanted to avoid this time around.”
Pratiksha was not the only one. Several other Flipkart users encountered the same issue. Samrat Deepak Raj tweeted about this asking, “Why I’m not able to do order anything? Do fix issues now! Am I single who can’t do anything on Flipkart?” The Flipkart support team apologized for this and tweeted, “Rest assured, we are working on this and request you try after some time. Thanks for your patience and understanding.”
What’s Going On At Flipkart?
Mails sent to Flipkart to find out why several products across various categories were unavailable or out of stock did not elicit any response. But the timing of Flipkart’s outage is definitely out of character.
Most e-commerce companies would go all out to ensure that their inventory is well stocked before its annual sales. After all, online retail is expected to touch Rs 4.9-trillion GMV this year as per a RedSeer report, and the annual sale is when they corner a good portion of this business.
This raises the question whether Flipkart had planned an outage to encourage more sales during its ‘Big Saving Days’. Also, even more surprising is the fact that stockout occurred when its competitor, Amazon, also has its annual sale. Amazon’s Prime Day sale will be held on 23 and 24 July.
Some vendors selling on Flipkart were also worried about the outage. “On a daily basis, we get around four to five orders for mobile phones, which more than doubles during the annual sale season,” said a Mumbai-based online seller on Flipkart. “In the current environment, we can’t afford to lose any customers. So even a day’s outage can be detrimental for our business.”
