But just before the sale, Kalyan became worried that the company might not be able to achieve its ambitious target. The number was exceptionally high – on a regular day, gross sales would amount to about ₹30 crore. Sales would have to multiply by twenty times for the company to attain its goal. Kalyan feared that they had overreached. In a panic, he decided to spend a lot more money on discounts and promotions. The Flipkart sale event was splashed all over newspapers, billboards and TV channels in the first week of October. In the big cities in particular, Flipkart was omnipresent. It was a classic advertising blitz. The company promised to sell some of its products, including gadgets and various accessories, for as low a price as ₹1. The weekend before the sale, Sachin and Binny wrote a joint email to customers, inviting them to shop on the site. ‘To celebrate Flipkart’s journey, we are going to have a sale to end all sales,’ they said.6
Soon, Flipkart’s rivals responded. On 4 October, two days before the sale, Amazon launched a three-day sale event of its own. They were calling it the Mission to Mars. Cleverer still was its move to buy the domain name BigBillionDay.com – anyone who typed ‘Big Billion Day’ on their browser landed on the Amazon site. Snapdeal, too, engaged in guerrilla warfare of its own. On 6 October, the final Big Billion Day ad on the front pages of newspapers urged customers, ‘Today, don’t look anywhere else. India’s greatest sale is here.’ Snapdeal ran an ad right next to it, with the cheeky tagline, ‘For others it’s a big day. For us, today is no different.’ It was the 2014 version of the Cola wars.
That day, the Flipkart leaders were tense. At daybreak, they assembled at the company’s new offices in Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road area, a few kilometres from the central office in Koramangala. Here, the Bansals, Kalyan and a few others sat in a ‘war room’, from where they would watch the sale unfold. Outside the room were the rank-and-file employees, many of whom hadn’t gone home for days. The density of people was such that the Wi-Fi crashed. Employees were asked to spread out. It wasn’t an encouraging omen.
The sale began at 6 a.m. The first two hours had been reserved for Flipkart employees. At 8 a.m., the sale was finally opened up to customers.
By 8.10 a.m., Flipkart’s website and mobile app stopped working. Despite the extensive preparations, the sites were overwhelmed by the deluge of customers. In India, the government railway booking website, irctc.co.in, attracted the highest volume of users among e-commerce businesses. On 6 October, Flipkart’s website received in an hour the volume of traffic that IRCTC drew across several days. Initially, Kalyan and his associates were thrilled. By 10 a.m., Flipkart had already achieved almost half of its ₹600 crore sales target. Though the website was still down for most customers, the Flipkart team believed it would be fixed soon. But at 11 a.m., the site was still not working.
Outside, everyone was celebrating. Every time a team achieved its target, horns were blown, loud cheers went up, employees danced on their desks. Inside the war room, the atmosphere was quiet, dark. The only light was from the projector screens. One screen showed the sales numbers. Another showed the metrics: the number of users and the ‘hits’ on the website. A third screen displayed tweets and Facebook posts from customers. By noon, the atmosphere had soured considerably. The graphs and patterns on the first two screens kept rising, but on the third screen, customer complaints had multiplied, too, like a drizzle turning into a torrent. Shoppers were very, very angry. They complained that they couldn’t access the website, that products had sold out before they could hit ‘buy,’ that Flipkart intentionally marked up prices just before the sale to make its discounts seem bigger, that every product was ‘out of stock’, and orders had been abruptly cancelled. It was a barrage. Less than ten per cent of the people who came to Flipkart were able to make a purchase. After the extensive marketing campaign promoting the sale, this was a major embarrassment. The pattern continued through the afternoon. Flipkart’s payment system broke, its tech systems crashed, as did the warehousing software.
By 6 p.m., it was done. The target had been achieved in ten hours. Flipkart had miscalculated, grossly underestimating Indians’ thirst for discounts. Worrying about a shortage of demand in the run-up to the sale, it had panicked, hurling large amounts of cash on marketing and discounts. The resulting flood of customers had turned out to be a disaster for its systems. The Bansals sent out a joint statement at the end of the sale: ‘The Big Billion Day is an unprecedented day for us as this is the biggest sale ever in India. We are delighted by the overwhelming response from our customers since 8 a.m. today.’ They mentioned that Flipkart had recorded a ‘billion hits’ and achieved its twenty-four-hour sales target of $100 million in just ten hours.7
Behind the curtain, the reckoning had begun. Around 6.30 p.m., Sachin and Binny began summoning those in charge of the sale, one by one, to one of the conference rooms in the office. Emphatically, Sachin pressed his point: ‘This is what happens when technology becomes a slave to business.’ One couldn’t become too tactical and rely only on discounts to grow the business, he pointed out grimly. Their tech systems had failed. ‘This is a huge embarrassment. We’ve let down our customers badly.’ One after the other, the people in charge of Big Billion Day walked out, their faces downcast. Sachin especially blamed Kalyan, later complaining to Flipkart investors that the Tiger Global representative had ‘damaged’ the company’s brand. It was true that, after the sale, the very papers and news channels that had carried Flipkart’s ads had
