Xiaomi Mi 3 on sale on Flipkart today: Here's how you could grab a unit

It’s been four rounds of Xiaomi’s ‘flash sales’ of its Mi 3 in India and we can safely say that a lot will have to change before the company can hope to make any sort of impact in India.   Our social media feeds are full of people complaining about the shoddy way in which Flipkart and Xiaomi have put the phone on sale, and the third round of sales, which **ended in a reported 1 second** , brought in even more heartbreak for some who were looking to get their hands on the phone, **one of the best you can buy right now** . But one woman managed to beat the rush and get an Mi 3 for herself.   Sowmya Rao accounted the process in a tweet. We say a tweet, but, in fact, the post ran several characters longer than Twitter’s 140 limit. If a person cannot describe in one ’legal’ tweet the process of buying a phone online, then there’s something wrong with the approach. But for your entertainment and possibly future planning, here’s Rao’s post in its entirety (edited for style).  

How I bought the #XiaomiMi3 on #Flipkart

  1) Registered early and made sure my husband also did 2) Logged into my account on Firefox and husband’s on Chrome at about 10: 30 am for 2 pm sale 3) Made sure default delivery address was correct on both accounts 4) Memorised card details for quick payment 5) Other users said key was clicking as soon as countdown ran down so positioned cursor on both windows on the middle ‘minute box’. 6) Practised the ‘alt-tab, click’ routine between my account on Firefox and husband’s account on Chrome - fixed position of cursor so that there would be no need to move it between the browser windows 7) Noticed that at around 1:30 or so, the countdown boxes between the two browsers were different (Chrome was slower than Firefox), so refreshed the page frequently and once at 1 min left. 8) When countdown ended, the BUY button was a couple of CMs ABOVE the countdown box!!! Quickly moved to click on it- then alt-tabbed and clicked again on chrome 9) Success on Firefox and none on Chrome 10) Message said it was on cart - so I opened another window (was logged in already on Firefox) and went to cart 10) Kept getting multiple 502 error messages from this point on till I made the payment. 11) At one point, I tried adding next-day delivery and page crashed, so decided to not add any extra options (gift-wrap etc) because didn’t want to risk losing the order 12) After making payment successfully for the first time, the page didn’t move from the ‘payment successful’ page to ‘order successful’ page 12) Went back to cart and followed same process - again requiring numerous f5 clicks and patience 13) Made payment again and this time clicked on the ’take me to Flipkart’ button’ immediately 14) Finally got the confirmation 15) Checked my ‘orders’ page a few second later to confirm 16) Posted on twitter! :) 17) Total time taken = 2 pm to 2:32 pm 18) Now going to start process of getting refund for the first order! Sigh. Tips: 1) Try to use 2 accounts 2) I had good luck with Firefox - make of that what you will 3) If you don’t have a delivery address saved, make sure you input an address and save it as the default - will ensure quick order process 4) Memorise your payment details 5) Click as soon as countdown ends 6) Open multiple windows once its in your cart and try to rapidly move through the 4 order clicks (order - address - payment - confirmation) 7) Don’t wait to add ’next day delivery’ or ‘gift-wrap’ etc - just keep moving on default settings quickly 8) Continue ordering until you see a successful order confirmation (don’t stop even if payment is made, but no order conf ). Keep hitting f5 (refresh). Double-check your orders page once you get a confirmation. 9) Take multiple screenshots for reference and refund, if required Good luck!      As you can see, even though she managed to get a phone, it wasn’t all smooth and she actually had to buy two phones to get one for sure. So Xiaomi and Flipkart better pull up their socks for the next round of sales, which will take place on August 12.