On Tuesday evening, Flipkart sent out an apology letter to customers who had faced frustrations completing transactions at its mega-sale on Monday. In fact, it was so apologetic, it even sent out the mail to people who had never used its service.   “It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation… to be able to create this day,” read the email. “An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday.”

The email admitted that the e-retailer faced several problems during the sale: prices of goods had changed, some items were not available and the firm's website didn't work very well.  “And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, we also realised that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event,” said the email. “We failed to live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologize once again to ever single customer for our failure.”

Still, it wasn't an unmitigated disaster. Flipkart said it did business worth Rs 600 crore in 10 hours.

Not all their customers were impressed.







Lawyer Kaushik Podder, who bought a Samsung LED TV for Rs 47,950, discounted from Rs 73,500, was annoyed when he got email saying that his order had not gone through. He said that he felt like he'd given Flipkart an interest-free loan for ten days.

“They take your money, charge your credit card and say they will refund you the money after ten days,” Poddar said. “This isn’t permitted under the Reserve Bank of India rules. One cannot raise money from the public in this manner. They can only do this via the banks.”