Flipkart apology email

flipkart-apology

Dear Customer, 

Yesterday was a big day for us. And we really wanted it to be a great day for you. 
But at the end of the day, we know that your experience was less than pleasant. 
We did not live up to the promises we made and for that we are really and truly sorry. 

It took enormous effort from everyone at Flipkart, many months of preparation and 
pushing our capabilities and systems to the limit to be able to create this day. 
We were looking at fulfilling the dreams of millions of Indian consumers through 
deals and offers we had painstakingly put together for months. 

And though we saw unprecedented interest in our products and traffic like never before, 
we also realized that we were not adequately prepared for the sheer scale of the event. 
We didn't source enough products and deals in advance to cater to your requirements. 
To add to this, the load on our server led to intermittent outages, further impacting 
your shopping experience on our site. 

An unprecedented 1.5 million people shopped at Flipkart yesterday. While we stand humbled 
by the sheer faith that such a large number of customers have shown in us, we are unhappy 
that we were unable to live up to the expectations of millions more who wanted to buy 
from us yesterday. 

And this is not acceptable to us. 

Delighting you, and every single one of our customers, is absolutely the top most priority 
for Flipkart and we have worked very hard over the last seven years to earn your trust. 
Yesterday, we failed that trust. We have learnt some valuable lessons from this and have 
started working doubly hard to address all the issues that cropped up during this sale. 

Price Changes 
As we were preparing various deals and promotional pricing in the lead up 
to the sale, the pricing of several products got ​changed to their non-discounted rates for 
a few hours​. We realise that this breaks the trust our customers have put in us. We are 
truly sorry for this and will ensure that this never happens again.

Out-of-stock Issues
We ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes 
(and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live. For example, most of our special deals
were sold out as soon as they went live. We had ensured availability, anywhere from hundreds
 to a few lakh units for various products, but it was nowhere near the actual demand. 
We promise to plan much better for future promotions and ensure that we minimise the 
out-of-stock issues. 

Cancellations 
We had large number of people buying specific products simultaneously. 
This led to some instances of an order getting over-booked for a product that was sold out 
just a few seconds ago. We are working round-the-clock to ensure availability of additional 
units for these products and will do our level best to ensure that we minimise any 
cancellations. 

Website Issues 
​We realise that the shopping experience for many of you was frustrating due 
to errors and unavailability of the website at times. We had deployed nearly 5000 servers 
and had prepared for 20 times the traffic growth - but the volume of traffic at different 
times of the day was much higher than this. We are continuing to significantly scale up 
all our back end systems so that we do a much, much better job next time. 

Everything that we have achieved at Flipkart is purely on the basis of our customer's trust
and faith. This is why we come to work each day and continue to remain extremely passionate
about building the best possible customer experience for Indian consumers. We failed to 
live up to this promise yesterday and would like to apologise once again to every single 
customer for our failure. 

Thank you. 
Sachin and Binny