Flipkart, one of India’s biggest retailer, is launching a day long shopping event on 6-10-2014 this year called ‘Big Billion Day’. Flipkart is expecting to unite a billion people through what they promise is going to be the greatest sale ever in India.
“Till date, India has seen shoppers across the country turn out in millions during festivals like Akshaya Tritiya and Dhanteras. With the ‘Big Billion Day’, Flipkart is set to replicate this concept of a single day of shopping on a massive scale online,” said the company. In a first of its kind event in India, on the ‘Big Billion Day’, Flipkart will run deep discounts across 70 categories. Flipkart claims the event will be different from any other sales that Indian e-commerce consumers have earlier seen.
Anticipating a very high volume of traffic during its ‘Big Billion Day’ sale on Monday, e-commerce major Flipkart has enhanced its technology capabilities, inventory, and supply-chain capacities. The company has doubled its ground staff to 10,000 over the past few months since it started planning for the event, and extended deliveries to 40 more cities. Flipkart had a team of about 5,000 delivery staff in July this year.
“When you scale up massively on one day, all touch points that interact with the consumers require large amount of planning,” Shoumyan Biswas, head of offline marketing at Flipkart.com confirmed without sharing the investment that the company has made for these preparations.
“Technology is the first area that needs to be strengthened because if the website crashes, you cannot even place an order. You also need to have that much inventory and you need to speed up your supply chain so that you have enough hands and legs on the ground,” he said. Also, there will be a lot of consumers who would visit the website for the first time and those people will need help, prompting the company to significantly increase the customer support team.
The preparations on the technology front are perhaps inspired by the incident in July this year when Flipkart’s website crashed as buyers flooded to order Chinese handset maker Xiaomi’s Mi 3 mobile phone devices, which were available exclusively on Flipkart.
Wondering what is special about 6-10-2014? 610 – the number of the flat from where Sachin and Binny Bansal, Flipkart promoters, began their journey in 2007.
