Flipkart.com, India’s largest web merchant, hopes to avoid last year’s big glitches by making its 2015 Big Billion sale an event only for users of its mobile app.

Flipkart.com, India’s largest online retailer, is bringing back its biggest annual online sales event the week of the Oct. 13. And this time Flipkart, No. 15 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Asia 500, promises the glitches that caused customer outrage over out-of-stock items or slow or nonexistent delivery have been fixed.

On Oct. 13 Flipkart, which posted web sales of about $1 billion in 2014, will start its Big Billion sale, but only through its mobile app. The weeklong event features the year’s deepest discounts and exclusive products across a wide range of merchandise categories including consumer electronics, furniture and home furnishings, jewelry and watches.

Flipkart conceived its Big Billion Day sale in October 2014 as a one-day sale to create an annual web shopping extravaganza not unlike Cyber Monday, the Monday following the Thanksgiving weekend in the United States and known for its deals. Flipkart claimed to have generated single-day sales of about $100 million last year, but the retailer’s website crashed after six hours. Many advertised products sold out in minutes with no available alternatives, and order fulfillment was slow, with some orders going unfilled because of delivery glitches, Flipkart says.

But Flipkart’s Big Billion sale also attracted as many as 1.5 million shoppers in India, a market that Forrester Research projects will grow annual online retail sales to as much as $30.8 billion by 2019 from $7.2 billion currently.

For the past year Flipkart has been apologizing for last year’s mistakes and for letting customers down. On the cusp of this year’s Big Billion sale, Flipkart has made multiple changes, including making the event exclusively mobile. Customers must sign up for Flipkart’s iPhone, iPad or Android platform apps that feature one-touch checkout for registered customers, product recommendations, delivery tracking and daily deals. “With over 75% of traffic coming via mobile, we expect this app-only sale to be the biggest shopping event of the year,” says Flipkart chairman Mukesh Bansal.

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Flipkart also has added fulfillment capacity across India to ensure more timely delivery. “We have also ramped up our technology and supply chain support to ensure all our 50 million customers have the best ever mobile shopping experience,” Bansal says. “In fact, to cater to the massive customer demand, we have opened new fulfillment centers across the country to guarantee efficient delivery.”

Flipkart, which merged with web-only apparel retailer Myntra in 2014, says it plans to offer more deals and in-stock inventory by including nearly 40,000 sellers on its marketplace in the Big Billion sale and marketing activity. “Considering the sale will feature fantastic deals across millions of products in all categories from over 40,000 sellers, our aim is to give our consumers no less than 5 days to shop,” Bansal says.

 

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