The Big Billion Day was a roaring success in India as e-commerce giant Flipkart made $100 million in 10 hours.
Indian online megastore, Flipkart made $100 million in sales within 10 hours yesterday – October 6, 2014 – on account of its ‘Big Billion Day’ sale. The online store offered products at throwaway prices, like an 8 GB pen drive for Rs 1, DSLR cameras at half the price. The shopping carnival also attracted 1 billion hits in 10 hours on the already very popular Indian website.
Extensive promotions were carried out for the mega scheme two weeks prior to October 6, 2014. On the day, Flipkart put up full page advertisements in leading English dailies like The Times Of India.
Co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal started a small e-bookstore in 2007 when they were living in a flat number 610, hence, the Big Billion Day – 06-10-2014 was intended to mark their journey from where they started out. The largest e-commerce website in India, the company has an advertising budget of a whooping Rs. 75 crore.
However, the sale did upset a lot of customers, who could not find what they wanted. Due to the massive sale, which started at 8 am IST, almost all the products were sold out within minutes. Users who tried logging in after 10 am, were left unsatisfied.
At around noon, the Flipkart servers gave way to the heavy traffic the site was getting and services were disrupted on the website for a short while. The Indian branch of the online giant Amazon trolled Flipkart when they bought the domain bigbillionday.com, which redirected users to amazon.in.
