Eager buyers angry that Flipkart only had a small stock to sell compared to the many who registered.
Mumbai, July 29, 2014: If you thought it was a record when Flipkart recorded 100,000 bookings for the Xiaomi Mi3 phone last week in 39 seconds -- think again. At 2 pm today, when bookings resumed, the online retailer saw 250,000 accessing the Mi3 page within the first 5 seconds, claims a release from the company.
This traffic load was 4 times higher than the heaviest level ever experienced by Flipkart’s infrastructure. At 2pm, when the countdown timer on the Mi 3 page hit 00:00:00, users were tried to instantly add the product to their shopping carts (resulting in liquidation of the entire inventory in just under 5 seconds)
Hugo Barra, Vice President, Xiaomi Global says, “We are completely overwhelmed by the demand for Mi 3 by our fans here in India and are working diligently with our manufacturing partners as well as our local partners and the user community here in India to bring more devices and deliver the best possible product experience with Mi 3 and other models to come.”
However there was a flip side of this sort of marketing: Inspite of so many hundreds of thousands of eager buyers, Xiaomi only had some 20,000 phones to sell till date.
Read a report by Francis D'Sa in Deccan Chronicle today: "....Flipkart had already sold out the handsets before ( many) could even refresh the page. Sadly, Flipkart did not seem to do justice to these customers. (They) should have allowed registering of the Mi 3 depending on only the number of handsets they could supply. For example, if they know they have 10,000 handsets, they should only register 10,000 customers..."
An angry reader writes in a comment to the D'Sa story: " Without fulfilling the earlier registrations, taking more registrations is dubious. It might be a phone to fight for; but fighting it the "Flipkart way" is dishonorable."
Flipkart and the Chinese maker Xiaomi, have perhaps, ended up frittering away the huge hype and expectancy that they-- with big media help -- gained in their foray last week... by seemingly over reaching themselves.
UPDATE: See our story on Flipkart's billion dollar boost