In February 2014, Flipkart partnered with Motorola Mobility to be the exclusive Indian retailer of its Moto G smartphone.[42] Motorola also partnered with Flipkart on the Moto E, a phone targeted primarily towards emerging markets such as India. High demand for the phone following its midnight launch on 14 May caused the Flipkart website to crash.[43] Flipkart subsequently held exclusive Indian launches for other smartphones, including the Xiaomi Mi 3 in July 2014 (whose initial release of 10,000 devices sold out in around 5 seconds),[44] the Redmi 1S and Redmi Note in late 2014,[45][46][47][48] and Micromax’s Yu Yunique 2 in 2017.[49] Flipkart held a 51% share of all Indian smartphone shipments in 2017, overtaking Amazon India (33%).[50]
On 6 October 2014, in honor of the company’s anniversary and the Diwali season,[51] Flipkart held a major sale that it promoted as “Big Billion Day”. The event generated a surge of traffic, selling $100 million worth of goods in 10 hours. The event received criticism via social media over technical issues the site experienced during the event and stock shortages.[52][53][54][55]
In October 2015, Flipkart reprised the Big Billion Day event as a multi-day event exclusive to the Flipkart app. Flipkart bolstered its supply chain and introduced more fulfillment centers to meet customer demand.[56] Flipkart achieved a gross merchandise volume of $300 million during the event, with the largest volumes coming from fashion sales and the largest value coming from mobiles.[57] In 2017, Flipkart sold 1.3 million phones in 20 hours on 21 September in its Big Billion Days promotion, doubling the number sold on the first day of the same event in 2016.[58]
In March 2015, Flipkart blocked access to its website on mobile devices and began requiring that users download the site’s mobile app instead. The following month, Myntra went further and discontinued its website on all platforms, operating exclusively through its app. The “app-only” model, however, proved to be unsuccessful for Myntra, reducing its sales by 10%, and its main website was reinstated in February 2016. The experiment with Myntra led to rumors that Flipkart itself would perform a similar move, but the company did not follow suit. In November 2015, Flipkart launched a new mobile website branded as “Flipkart Lite” that provides an experience inspired by Flipkart’s app and runs in smartphone web browsers
Flipkart 