Flipkart's first Big Billion Day sold ₹600 crore — and its founders apologised

Flipkart's first Big Billion Day sold ₹600 crore in 10 hours. The next morning, its founders apologised to every customer.

That was 6 October 2014. The site buckled, products went out of stock in seconds, orders were cancelled and many shoppers felt the discounts weren't real. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal put their own names on an email that said, "We failed to live up to this promise."

Most companies would have quietly buried the idea. So how did that crash become India's shopping festival?

Three things happened. • They ran it again the next year, this time on the app, and kept running it. • The rivals joined in. Amazon launched its own festive sale in 2015 to take it on, and soon Meesho ,Snapdeal and others ECom Players in India. • One shopper, many doors, every October. • It plugged into a habit India already had. Families have always saved the TV, the fridge or the new phone for the weeks before Diwali. • The sale didn't create that habit. It moved it from the traditional market to Online purchase, and EMIs and bank offers made the bigger purchase possible.

Twelve years on, the first two days of this year's sale did about ₹24,000 crore, Six times a normal day, and Two out of three shoppers came from Tier-2 towns and Rural India, according to Redseer Strategy Consultants.

2014 was an operations failure. What happened after it was a lesson in trust: Own the Mistake in Public, Fix it, and Come back next year.

What was the first thing you bought in a festive sale, and was the deal really worth it?