A Kart emptied?
The
first time I heard about the ‘Big Billion’ day was when I opened the newspaper
and saw Snap deal’s advertisement in Times of India. Yes you read it right. The
reason why I saw Snap deal’s Ad first was because it was on the inner front
page. Flip Kart’s Ad was on the left side. I guess getting the wrong side of
the first page of the paper in itself was an indication of the things to come.
What could have become a poster day
for Indian e-tailing’s booming growth turned out to be a lack luster event
marred with technical glitches and stock outs. The same thing happened way back
in 2006 when Big bazaar did a live version of this kind of a sale. The next
day, they announced that they were keeping the sale open for 3 more days which
was quite an astute saving grace.
Flipkart said a sorry and I think
they mean it. They could have followed up the sorry with some too sweet-to-refuse
offers in the following days. But I think they might have thought that such an
offer would again result in the servers getting overloaded and/or a stock out
situation. The reason why I think Flipkart meant it when they said sorry is
because they really do not need to make money through such shortcuts. If you
have been following the news, any layman would understand that they are flush
with cash. Add to this, a startup (yes, they still are quite young an organization
in that sense which was started only in 2007) would never want to lose their
reputation especially when the founders are from a premier institute (the idea
is they wouldn’t resort to such simpleton measures if at all they were trying
to dupe us all).
What is interesting is that the
episode spoke volumes about us as a society. We were just waiting for something
to go wrong and pounce up on them and say “I told ya!” Twitter was flush with
messages and taunts against Flipkart. What we forgot was how much we were in
love with this brand until the day before. We couldn’t stop singing praises of
how good their supply chain is! How fast and efficient they are with their
delivery process! How wonderful a business model! It is quite worry some to see
that very few of us thought of looking at it as a mistake. Of course, it could
have been avoided. But they are a team which doesn’t have a sea of experience
to learn from. If at all they had people who are experienced in the business,
e-tailing is relatively new. This was the first time something like this was
attempted on such a large scale. It might have been attempted in other
countries. But we all know how unique India as a country is and how diverse customers
from different state are with regard to preferences and choices. And lastly,
let us not forget, we are a customer base of about 1/6th of the
entire mankind!
If not for anything else, being the
world’s most vibrant democracy have taught us to gain forgiveness as a virtue.
What else would explain some of our political laeaders coming to power time and
again in spite of their not-so-saintly pasts? So let us give the Bansals one
more chance, shall we? J
Arun Babu
Yes I agree . Let's give them one more chance. After all, its good to make their own mistakes, if at all they learn from it. Forgiveness is not a virtue, its a must have for 'Peace of mind' ;) - Parvathy.
ReplyDelete