Flipkart: Big Battle Ready

It is game on at Flipkart. India’s most-valued startup is out to prove its critics wrong and stay ahead of the deep-pocketed global giant Amazon. And its leaders, and 8,000-plus team, believe they can innovate to grow even stronger as India’s ecommerce story heads into uncharted territory.

- Harichandan Arakali

The year 2014 was eventful for Flipkart, India’s biggest online shopping company. It was the year when founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (no relation) catapulted to global fame on the back of their biggest funding at the time—a billion dollars. It was the year they launched their mobile app. It was also the year Flipkart’s Big Billion Day (BBD) sale was born.

Flipsters, as staff at Flipkart call themselves, take pride in pulling many all-nighters ahead of a “BBD” to ensure consumers access the best deals without any glitches. That first BBD in 2014, however, was a bit of a disaster, even though the company did reach the Rs 600 crore, or $100 million, target it had set itself.

By late evening that day, “we had to shut down our site and tell people that the sale was over”, recalls Smrithi Ravichandran, a senior director at Flipkart, and orchestrator-in-chief of the BBDs. “The surge in traffic was phenomenal. We didn’t expect that kind of scale. If things had been good that day, we could have probably done Rs 1,200 crore or Rs 1,500 crore, probably,” Ravichandran still rues during her interview with Forbes India.

Two years on, she got her chance at redemption.

The sale is always organised around Diwali which sees the country’s biggest shopping frenzy every year. The one in 2016 ran for five full days. On the second day alone, the biggest of the five, Flipkart saw Rs 1,400 crore in sales. Ravichandran, 32, declined to reveal the take at the end of the five days, but clearly it was a triumph.