 "We're truly sorry: Flipkart founders' apology for Big Billion Day blunders")
After a multitude of complaints over the Big Billion Day flash sale, Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal today issued a mea culpa of sorts to all customers apologizing for the inconveniences customers faced, saying that they were “really and truly sorry”.
“Yesterday was a big day for us. And we really wanted it to be a great day for you. But at the end of the day, we know that your experience was less than pleasant. We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry,” the email said.
The two founders highlighted the preparations that the company had undertaken over the last few months for the day and said that while they did see unprecedented interest in their products, and traffic “like never before”, they discovered they weren’t prepared enough for an event of that scale.
“We didn’t source enough products and deals in advance to cater to your requirements. To add to this, the load on our server led to intermittent outages, further impacting your shopping experience on our site,” they said in the email.
The duo said that they were unhappy that they didn’t live up to the expectations of the millions who wanted to buy from them and they said it was unacceptable to them given how hard they had worked to earn the trust of customers.
“Yesterday, we failed that trust. We have learnt some valuable lessons from this and have started working doubly hard to address all the issues that cropped up during this sale,” they said.
The duo admitted that prices of several products were changed to non-discounted rates for a few hours as they prepared various deals and promotional schemes and said it wouldn’t happen again. They also promised to plan better for future promotion offers and ensure they minimised the incidents where customers found their desired goods to be out of stock.
They admitted that there were instances where people buying specific products simultaneously led to over-booking of items and cancellation. The company said it would ensure availability of the itemsand do its best to minimise cancellations of customers’ orders.
The duo said that they had prepared for traffic to grow 20 times during the sale but in some cases it was more than that due to which customers kept getting errors.
“We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time,” Sachin and Binny Bansal said.
The apology by Flipkart coming a day after it initially skipped around the issue of multiple user complaints about issues, may have come a tad little late. But the group is likely to get some kudos for choosing to acknowledge the errors on their part.
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