 "Snapdeal's no Alibaba: Twitterati trash co's #SnapdealSavingsDay flash sale")
While Chinese online retailer Alibaba managed to sell goods worth $8 billion in its Single’s Day sale ( one-day sale on 11 November), Snapdeal, which today attempted its own version of the one-day flash sale saw its Savings Day discount scheme face a lot of flak for failing to meet customers’ demand.
Snapdeal has been lining up sales as part of its Snapdeal Savings Day where it promised to give customers savings on an hourly basis, something that it failed to live up to.
Customers trying to access the e-tailer in the morning complained of not being able to access it, while others said that the products that were supposed to go on sale weren’t available.
The company blamed it on “intermittent issues” on Twitter. However, there was no public response from the company after the initial set of responses to irate tweets.
Snapdeal’s Savings Day campaign, like Flipkart’s Big Billion Day, seemed inspired by Alibaba’s ‘Single’s Day’ celebration which it has had on 11 November every year since 2009.The company hascopyrighted the “Double 11” term three years after recognising its commercial potential.
And while Alibabaemploys a “pre-sale initiative”, under which merchants advertise products at their discounted Singles’ Day price from a month earlier, in India Flipkart’s traders were accused of raising prices before the sale. Aliababa’s Tmall lets customers put down a deposit for the order but only allows merchants to process the full payment and ship the products on 11 November.
Alibaba says its 11 November sale has grown from just 27 participating vendors in 2009 to 27,000 now, but the Indian e-tailers seem to be suffering from a lack of merchants offering products at the advertised discounted rates leading to anger among their customers.
Many of the deals advertised on the e-tailer led to products that had already been sold out leading to users venting their frustration on Twitter.
Here are some examples:
Some compared it to Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale: