It was mayhem last Monday as Flipkart announced it’s mega sale titled “Big Billion Day”. A bit of a misnomer considering Flipkart later said about 1.5 million people logged in on the site that day. By the time this is printed, everything that can be written about the sale has been written. The sale has inspired a lot, from jokes — comparing the home-grown e-tailer to many politicos — to an expletive laden open letter, to the buyers, and to Flipkart as well.
Amidst all the brouhaha, Flipkart sent a tear-stained apology letter to its users, making everyone become the next forgiving person, in line for sainthood.
But there is one thing this all points to. Earlier, shopping during the festive season involved entering a busy market area with a dejected father and an excited mother for most of us. This year has probably changed the way we look at festive season shopping.
Buying things online isn’t a big deal anymore, but this year, apart from Flipkart, consumers have more choice with Amazon and Snapdeal in the market. And this may be the first year, a significant portion of us are buying a majority of new festive clothes online.
Karthik Srinivasan, Social @ Ogilvy’s national lead, who fondly remembers shopping for fireworks as a child growing up in Tiruchi says “e-commerce works perfectly in tandem with people's primary past-time on Diwali — to watch 'special' TV programmes on all the 562 channels!”
“Turning up in a store offline for a sale involves physical movement and that is, given current traffic and crowds in most metros, is a chore. Turning up in an online store is zero effort, so there's obviously going to be massive interest in ecommerce going forward. Many Indians are discovering e-commerce now and it'd only get better (or worse, if you see the increasing traffic putting extra load on servers),” he adds. This change, he calls “fantastic”, can only get better “with deeper internet penetration and better mobile-based access. The demand is already here, and can only get better - what's still not ready is the back-end — technology that can truly scale, delivery mechanism, payment mechanism”.
27-year-old Abhishek Madan who bought a 32-inch TV on an “impulse” during the Flipkart sale, says he has had mostly positive experiences with Indian websites. “For me, e-commerce is as much about saving time as it is about saving money. So I steer clear of websites that might inconvenience me.”
Diwali or Eid in our childhoods consisted tiring trips to the busiest possible shopping areas in the city, where if someone lets go of your hand, you may very well end up on the missing persons report on Doordarshan (“Last seen wearing something that will embarrass her in front of adult friends when they come over for dinner, looking at awful childhood photographs”). Ease of use, and mostly, laziness has made e-commerce an easy way out of such incidents.
For Vaishnavi Prasad, a travel writer, “what you see online, is often NOT (emphasis hers) what you get”. She, though, didn’t fall prey to the temptation on sale day. “I saw a camera lens on sale for a great deal and I was sorely tempted, but being the sceptic that I am, last minute, I backed out.”
Online buying also works perfectly well for impulsive shoppers. Food blogger and Pune-based advertising professional Protima Tiwary calls herself “impulsive when it comes to online shopping”, but “takes out some time before the checkout to review the items again”. This, she says, ensures that the experience remains pleasant for her.
Not everyone has a pleasant experience shopping online. Take the case of R. Ramkumar. The 21-year-old wedding photographer says Flipkart’s customer service is “non-existent. I have had to deal my issue through email as every time I call them I end up speaking with 3-4 of their employees who in the end tell me to put it all on the email.”
In a few cases, bad service makes sure the consumer never comes back. “What's needed is to keep the ears to the ground, ascertain spread and tone of feedback, bucket feedback quickly and address them in batches, as fast as possible,“ says Srinivasan.
For all its supposed ineptitude on sale day, Flipkart seems to have won back everyone, first with its apology and later, a lot of support from other buyers. So what do we do now? Buy more, because nothing is sweeter than telling your second cousin what a great deal you got on that tablet which came in a bundle with the home theater system.
