In response to the criticism on social media on Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Day’ sale, Sachin and Binny Bansal sent an e-mail on Tuesday to its customers, accepting their mistakes for most of the problems encountered by buyers on Monday’s mega sale.
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.
And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realised 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.
Customers have complained about getting products at different prices than what was actually displayed. Flipkart apologised to the price change complaints as 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.
On customers’ repeated frustration due to various products going out of stock, company’s CEO and CFO said,
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.
The letter ended, saying,
Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer’s trust and faith…We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single customer for our failure.
