Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer brought the high-end smartphone to India and tied up its sales exclusively with Flipkart. From the time of the launch, Xiaomi and Flipkart informed its Indian fans that they would start registrations followed by the sale. On day one of the sale, Flipkart ran out of inventory of 5,000 10,000 handsets (Edit: Official stats from Xiaomi) within 38 minutes.
The next sale took place on 29 July, where Flipkart reportedly placed 10,000 handsets at the sales counters. However, the sale lasted just a few seconds with thousands of customers witnessing the ‘Out of stock!’ message within 4 seconds of the sale going live.
Watch: How the Flipkart Xiaomi Mi 3 sale ended in 4 seconds
Was this a gimmick to create hype? Was this a technique to check the number of handsets that are needed in India? Were they really having as many handsets for sale as they claimed? Did they really sell handsets that day? Well, only Flipkart and Xiaomi know the exact truth.
Xiaomi, witnessed a sale of almost 140,000 handsets in a week when they launched their handsets in China and took them over two months get them manufactured and delivered to the customers. Well, that was the case of their first Mi handset a few years ago. However, they should have speculated this demand before shipping the goods into the country this time. Else they should have placed a strategy where fans could be assured of their goods and overbooking should have been avoided. This would assure that Flipkart and Xiaomi does not tarnish their titles here in India. A lot of disgusted fans put up their woes as comments, tweets and posts on various websites and social media.
Also read: Flipkart does it again, deprives Mi 3 customers
Manu Jain, Head of Operations, Xiaomi India, told the media that Flipkart witnessed a whopping 2.5 lakh hits at the dot of 2 PM on July 29, the second flash sale. Handsets were already sold within a few seconds. He also added that they were ramping up the production on the backend to meet the demands in India, when asked about shortage of devices for customers that are in queue.
The next flash sale is scheduled for August 5 and this time, Flipkart has asked the customers to re-register again since the older registrations would not be applicable.
Will Flipkart disappoint Mi fans again this time? Will Flipkart create a new method of assuring that handsets will not be overbooked? Will Flipkart run into the threat of losing the trust of its customers? We shall only know of it on August 5.
