Flipkart's Big Billion Day Sale - Sale with no Logic?

Typically every festival season marketers burn the mid-night oil to come up with block buster offers. For many years this responsibility was shouldered by LGs Samsung’s in the Durables Business and then the Mobile marketers, which lined up new products and offers during the festive season, but this year it is the ecom firms which are hogging the limelight or should I say the front pages of newspapers (albeit through full page ads)….

This post is specifically about the flash sales and the one-day sale model which flipkart has been using. They have had a series of flash sales for the Motorola and Xiaomi mobiles. Today morning they have tried a similar model with the one day sale model where they have ridiculously priced products up for sale like a Samsung Tab2 for 1,390, hand blender for 1 and so on

And this was backed up a fairly aggressive TV and print campaign and obviously numerous reminders on Facebook and where not...

But even at 8.02 AM in the morning what you can see is "Sold-Out" for these products, I think flipkart is playing with fire, what does it want to do with this kind of sale, create awareness? Then let them be warned, these limited stock deals create more heart-burn than any long term customer loyalty and if they think consumers cannot see through their tactics then they are again very wrong.

Do they want to clear old stocks,  or do they just want more people visiting their site??? Hopefully they are mature enough to think beyond the eyeballs model.

And even before the event I can see a lot of negative posts about them on social networking sites and even in the earlier flash sales , I could read more negative

comments than good experiences being shared.

I use to be a loyal flipkarter till some time back, but have shifted out to their nearest competitor, but even then I am worried about the direction which flipkart is going....