Big Billion Day: ‘Marked up’ prices, crashing server spoil Flipkart party

The great deals and discounts that e-commerce majors such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and others are announcing in full-page advertisements every day this festive season may not all be for real.
India’s biggest e-commmerce company, Flipkart, in particular earned the ire of disgruntled shoppers by offering some supposedly discounted items at prices higher than what rivals such as Amazon and Snapdeal were offering.


For instance, a MacBookAir 13” was priced at Rs. 56,490 on Flipkart but Snapdeal sold it for Rs. 49,999.

In other instances, the company allegedly marked up the retail prices of some products and then offered “discounts” that brought the selling prices close to market rates.

“But the digital customer is smart. With so many social sites, it will be difficult to pull a wool over their eyes. They will see through any such attempt,” said Sandeep Komaravelly, senior VP (marketing) at rival Snapdeal.com.


To be fair, this practice of ramping up prices and then offering a “discount” was not true for all products, since a few discounts were genuine and lapped up by the customers.


Flipkart’s big festive season sale, The Big Billion Day, overburdened its servers, which crashed within two hours of the sale opening, angering shoppers further. “The traffic was heavy but our server did not crash,” a Flipkart spokesperson said, but refused to give any details.

Shoppers took to Twitter, Facebook and blogging to attack the company’s pricing.


A Twitter user, @Surnell, posted screenshots of what purported to show Flipkart raising prices of a product in the run-up to the sale only to slap a discount on Mon




Ishwar singhal
pgdm 2year
source HT