10,000 employees did 12 hour shifts for Flipkart's 'Big Billion' sale

To accommodate that, we have increased our capacity and manpower well in advance by 50%,” said Mohit Tandon, co-founder Delhivery, of e-commerce logistics firm.

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BANGALORE: Preparing for Big Billion sale on Monday at Flipkart has been nothing short of a war-drill as the online retailer geared up to offer its customers whopping discounts.

Flipkart scurried up a stand-by battalion of 10,000 workforce to prepare for the big bash and employees, ET learned, worked 12-hour shifts over the preceding Dussehra weekend. On D-Day, staff reported to work at 5:00 a.m to hit the ground running when the sale began.

"Though preparations started about three weeks back, the last one week the whole technology and marketplace team has been working at least 12 hours. Some of us are sleeping in office. Sachin has arranged for mattresses for all of us," said a senior technology department employee on condition of anonymity.

While marketing and advertising efforts of marketplaces continue to keep up, players in the periphery including logistics and payment providers geared up for pumped up demand around festive sales offered by Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal. "We expect Flipkart shipment to increase 5 to 8 times.

To accommodate that, we have increased our capacity and manpower well in advance by 50%," said Mohit Tandon, co-founder Delhivery, of e-commerce logistics firm. The company, which expects shipments to double in October said that it has been in talks with all marketplaces since the last two-three months to understand their demand expectations.

PayU has increased its capacity by six times to accommodate surge in volumes and the payment gateway reportedly sees an average of 6 thousand transactions per minute on their servers. "Our overall volumes have doubled up in last three days in terms of transactions," said Nitin Gupta, co-founder at payment gateway provider PayU India, whose clients include Snapdeal and Jabong.

However, Flipkart's primary mode to process transactions online still remains its PayZippy, its own payment gateway. "Online payment is not such a big proportion of Flipkart's technology backend since 80% orders are cash on delivery," said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CMD, One97 Communications.

In an earlier interview with ET, Gaurav Vora, director of packaging company Dynaflex, which provides packing material for e-commerce firms, such as Flipkart, Myntra and Amazon said that it's working to double capacity looking at the ecommerce boom in India.

"These companies are changing Indian customer behaviour and getting them to shop online," said Satyen Kothari, director of payment gateway company CitrusPay.

"This reminds me of a situation 10 years ago when we saw Black Friday sales tipping online in the US."

Undoubtedly, e-commerce sector has become a battleground for players to capture market share. "Who will win the front-end wars in e-tailing is anyone's guess," said Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail advisory firm Technopak.

"However, there is more certainty there will be many winners that support the e-tail businesses' ecosystem, including logistics, packaging, and software products companies."

Ajeet Kumar
PGDM 3rd SEM