Some people thinks themselves as XXXXXX and write all the bullshits... And for some one who mentioned...people were expecting black Friday deals...its not the people expecting it, but its FK who made it to believe like that... Anyways after all these online retailers are managed by the typical Indian heads...so they knew these cheap marketing gimmicks...
Bait and Switch: Flipkart made 600 Crores GVM on BigBillionday sale
- Thread starter swatkats
- Start date
psyph3r
Skilled
Dear Customer,
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.
It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. 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.
An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.
And this is not acceptable to us.
Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. 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.
Price Changes As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up to the sale, the pricing of several products got changed to their non-discounted rates for a few hours. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.
Out-of-stock Issues We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the out-of-stock issues.
Cancellations We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any cancellations.
Website Issues We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time.
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
Thank you.
Sachin and Binny
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.
It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. 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.
An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.
And this is not acceptable to us.
Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. 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.
Price Changes As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up to the sale, the pricing of several products got changed to their non-discounted rates for a few hours. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.
Out-of-stock Issues We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the out-of-stock issues.
Cancellations We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any cancellations.
Website Issues We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time.
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
Thank you.
Sachin and Binny
avi
Skilled
So I sent forwarded my lawyer's notice as mentioned in thread and I received an reply from Sachin & Binny:
So guys, shall I pursue this case further or not? @xtremevicky I will refund back your donation, if I decide to not to pursue this case further, but thanks for believing in me.
So guys, shall I pursue this case further or not? @xtremevicky I will refund back your donation, if I decide to not to pursue this case further, but thanks for believing in me.
avi
Skilled
'Server' is a vague term. Config matters. What if they have set up 5000 Raspberry Pis? That's still 5000 servers
Looks quite believable to me for the kind of load they needed to handle. Of course each of them will not be a separate physical machine. They will all be virtual machines running of the cloud or maybe their own racks.
swatkats
Skilled
I think they're BS us. Currently 200 to 5,000 servers.. Really?'Server' is a vague term. Config matters. What if they have set up 5000 Raspberry Pis? That's still 5000 servers
[DOUBLEPOST=1412695426][/DOUBLEPOST]
Could be cloud. Still 5000 figure not digestible. 3,000 servers are lot for 1.5million hits.
paarkhi
Skilled
regarding The Big Billion Day
Dear Customer,
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.
It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. 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.
An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.
And this is not acceptable to us.
Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. 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.
Price Changes As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up to the sale, the pricing of several products got changed to their non-discounted rates for a few hours. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.
Out-of-stock Issues We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the out-of-stock issues.
Cancellations We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any cancellations.
Website Issues We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time.
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
Thank you.
Sachin and Binny
Dear Customer,
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.
It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. 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.
An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy from us yesterday.
And this is not acceptable to us.
Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. 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.
Price Changes As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up to the sale, the pricing of several products got changed to their non-discounted rates for a few hours. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.
Out-of-stock Issues We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the out-of-stock issues.
Cancellations We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any cancellations.
Website Issues We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time.
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
Thank you.
Sachin and Binny
avi
Skilled
It all depends on config! Bloody hell, how to make you guys understand. And we are on a tech forum. These 5000 could be t1.micro instances on AWS.I think they're BS us. Currently 200 to 5,000 servers.. Really?
Could be cloud. Still 5000 figure not digestible. 3,000 servers are lot for 1.5million hits.
They never mentioned 5000 cores.
Thats quite ironical, cos Big Bazaar blatantly plays with changing MRPs. He He.
Btw another joke, even with these crappy prices of Flipkart, they are still better than B&M stores anyday
I think they're BS us. Currently 200 to 5,000 servers.. Really?
Could be cloud. Still 5000 figure not digestible. 3,000 servers are lot for 1.5million hits.
My present company has about 400 odd services to run to make our entire system functional and each service may have multiple instances with load balancing depending on the load on that sub system. Each node may be handling a load of anywhere from 5000 to 1,00,000 depending on the kind of sub-system being run on it. Many of the systems have instances ranging from 2 to 40. The system as a whole still handles a load of maybe 1.5~2Lac concurrent users. Certain independent parts of the system that service static web resources etc. may be capable of drastically more, but at the end of the day, the capacity of the whole system is dependent on the weakest links in the system.
In Flipkart's case if we take a conservative estimate and assume that they have only about 200 unique services to run and drastically simplify the math as well. On Avg, they have about 5000/200 = 25 virtual machines for each service. If each of those sub systems were needed to handle a load of 15Lac, that works out to 15Lac/25 = 60k. So on avg, each instance needs to handle a load of 60k. That is a pretty believable figure to me. I know people will come and say that some web server will handle a much higher load, but their systems are not just limited to web servers.
From the limited amount of knowledge of their Tech stack, I know that they use node.js for some of the things in their systems and node.js can only scale horizontally for the most part. So the only way to scale such sub systems is to keep increasing the number of instances of those services and there is a limit to how many node.js processes you can run on each virtual machine.
Of course, my entire calculation is just guess work and I may be wrong, but still 5000 servers (virtual machines) does not sound so unbelievable.
swatkats
Skilled
@Lord Nemesis detailed reply indeed.
quixand
Skilled
End to End inventory visibility is still the number one challenge. This was online only, imagine what goes on for retailers doing omnichannel sales.
OT: Some numbers quoted by Xiaomi
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Exe...-of-100-million-smartphones-in-2015-president
OT: Some numbers quoted by Xiaomi
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Exe...-of-100-million-smartphones-in-2015-president
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avi
Skilled
swatkats
Skilled
Snapdeal Might have made more money than Flipkart on BigBillionday.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/ne...n-big-sale-day-says-social-media-study-604420
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/ne...n-big-sale-day-says-social-media-study-604420