Flipkart gearing up for another 'Big Billion-day' sale; promises a much bigger and better experience

Flipkart’s Big Billion day sale last year was more of a **big disaster day sale** for most of its customers. Sure, Flipkart laughed its way to the bank with **Rs 600 crore worth of sales** , but customer rage was also high enough to prompt **Flipkart to issue an apology** mail. But Flipkart it seems is confident to do another Big Billion day sale. According to a report in The Economic Times, Flipkart is planning a better Big Billion day sale where it aims to deliver goods faster, anticipate demand and eliminate sale of fake products. It did not specify the exact date of the sale. According to Flipkart CEO and Co-founder Sachin Bansal, the Big Billion day sale, which had participation from 1.5 million shoppers, was a huge learning experience. “We have already started to implement processes in order to scale up our tech capabilities,” he told ET. Flipkart is well aware of the technical difficulties which plagued its first sale and will be working on improving the backend. Flipkart will also be working closely with sellers to help them predict demand and invest more in automating the supply chain to improve delivery times. Increasing the strength of the technology team in the next 12-18 months is on top of the e-tailer’s agenda. There are currently around 1,000 employees in its engineering division. Apart from the web, Flipkart hopes to see huge participation from its mobile app customers as well. Mobile commerce is increasing at a faster rate than desktop for Flipkart and it aims to capitalise on this in its next Big Billion day sale, said Bansal. Another area which Bansal aims to improve is data analytics which will offer personalised experiences to customers. Flipkart has collected over 500TB of commerce data from its Big Billion day sale, which it plans to use wisely. “We primarily use data to predict customer trends based on region, gender, wish list etc., to drive an enriching shopping experience,” Bansal told the paper. Flipkart also aims to have around 1 lakh sellers on its platform and ensure that at least 10,000 of them make businesses **over a million ruppees** by selling on Flipkart. To ensure quality control, Flipkart will not entertain sellers which have been blacklisted on other e-commerce sites. It will ensure that sellers have a registered business and are able to offer original products with warranties. Economic Times stated that the e-tailer is looking at another round of funding to take the valuation from $11.25 billion to $15 billion. It also hopes to sell goods worth $3 billion by the end of this financial year and $5 billion till March 2016. Flipkart has raised people’s expectations and it looks like it has no option but to deliver on its promises, if it wants to win customer goodwill.