The much awaited Great Online Shopping Festival initiated by Google India left over 200 online retailers and 3.2 million shoppers high and dry after the website >>www.gosf.in crashed on the opening day itself. The website greeted the visitors with a ‘Hello World’ message.
In its second edition of the shopping festival, Google India had extended the time period for three days from just 24 hours last year.
The company apologised for the inconvenience caused to shoppers on the first day and added that the website was experiencing some technical issues and work was on to resolve it.
Manu Kumar Jain, Co-founder, Jabong.com, said, “We expected a much higher number of visits from the GOSF's site but unfortunately the site crash has been a dampener. However, we still saw a significant increase in visits and orders from other sources as people were already aware of the festival. On the first day itself we saw 4-5 times growth in revenue over last year. This would possibly have been higher has the GOSF site been up and running perfectly.”
A company spokesperson ruled out huge traffic as a reason for the crash. However, several e-tailers were disappointed, given Google’s reputation, but hoped that sales would catch up in the next two days.
Online retailers were critical about the fact that the event was not exclusive and many unknown players were allowed to participate. They should have also checked the quality of deals that were being offered, the e-tailers added.