The second year of the Big Billion Day sale has been a resounding success for all the marketplace players such as Flipkart and Amazon. In an interview with BusinessLine, Ankit Nagori, Chief Business Officer of Flipkart talks about the preparation before the event and how important it has been for the company’s future operations.

Compared to the previous Billion Day sale, how successful has the current one been?

This year, it has been a massive success. Our GMV (gross merchandise value or value of total sales) has been more than three times. The GMV was more than $300 million with 80 lakh shipments. We saw close to 150 million unique visitors coming in. Now, we are the number one app on iOS and android store. So, from a customer and seller point of view, it was a very successful event. Over 40,000 sellers participated and we believe that 100 of them are set to become dollar millionaires.

What steps did you take this time to avoid the glitches from your last year’s event?

Earlier, we just didn’t have the idea of the demand that such a sale would generate. This year, we had a lot more sophisticated demand planning and understanding. At the backend, we strengthened our infrastructure. The entire sales happened on the mobile app and we think it was a strategic move. The app worked very well on 2G and 3G and even low-end smartphones. We received more than 50 per cent of our demand from tier II and III cities. We opened four more warehouses and ensured that there were enough number of delivery boys than last year.

Your competitors claim that they were better at logistics and were able to deliver faster. What steps did you take to ensure that logistics was not an issue this time?

Larger number of warehouses ensured that the product was sitting closer to the customer. We also deployed a large number of delivery boys and we had better inventory planning and we also mapped the regions to find out which products sell most in those places.

So, when did the preparations for the Big Billion Day(s) start and how was the overall experience?

The last one month has been very hectic for the team. We have been camping in the office and have been working through the nights and weekends. We also believe that such events make us push our limit. Given the spike we have seen in sales, it will become business as usual very, very soon. So, whatever we have done, it will help us sustain our business next year in a business as usual scenario.

What have been the key takeaways from this event?

I think, there have been two or three key takeaways. We have realised that mobile app will henceforth be the primary channel of sales. The talk about us not being customer friendly because we conducted this event on mobile app has been proven wrong. The other thing is that still a lot more depends on the system and the bottleneck is not the demand but the supply chain and logistics in the next years to come.

Among all the products that were sold during the event, which were the ones which sold most?

Mobile phones continue to be the leading category. We sold more than $200 million worth of phones. Fashion was a leading category too, but in terms of volume. Along with Myntra, we have a very big market share. TVs with larger screens and large appliances was another big thing for us and we sold more than one lakh units. Furniture is picking up fast. On mobile phones, our discounts ranged from ₹1,000 to ₹2,000, on fashion, the discount was as high as 25 per cent and on TVs it ranged from ₹6,000 to ₹40,000.

There were some tweets about how some of the products were priced higher just before the sale and then they were given at discounted prices which meant that you sold them at the same price.

I can absolutely vouch for the fact that this did not happen this time. We learnt our lessons from the last time. There were some sellers who did it last time. But we got our algorithm right this time and saw to it this time it didn’t happen. If it had happened, it would have become a big issue.

Will you start holding such Big Billion Day more often, say on special occasions like festivals.

It is a very fair point. Every category in India has a special day. There are about six and seven category-specific trends and being the market place and being the horizontal player, we have to showcase but something as big as Big Billion Day has to be once a year. This also requires preparation and banking partners and payment gateways have to be robust.

Do you think such Big Billion Day sales will attract additional taxes?

I don’t know. But it is a very, very transparent market place which Flipkart is creating. It is a platform for the sellers, vendors and customers to chat and interface. We are generating demand through better products, better services and better marketing.

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