The Indian e-commerce industry has seen more than 400% growth in four years, according to an expert cited by moneycontrol.com, but the massive surge has not come without serious hiccups. The most recent incident featured the growing Bangalore-based retailer Flipkart, providing a cautionary tale about preparedness for traffic spikes.
The Amazon competitor's highly publicized "Big Billion Day" of deep-discount offers created problems almost immediately as Flipkart's servers failed to handle the influx of customers. Many consumers found their purchasing process interrupted as the shopping cart application was overwhelmed.
The backlash was precisely what you'd expect: Angered consumers took to Twitter, rechristening the company as #flopkart. The firestorm online prompted the retailer to issue apology emails to the customers left out in the cold by order cancellations, website crashes and out-of-stock issues caused by the failure of their e-commerce system.
As Business Insider notes, other retailers can use this incident as an example. Among the many problems that Flipkart had, the most basic was that its servers simply couldn't handle the immense response to their advance publicity for the event.
Hostway can help you ensure you don't end up feeling the heat like Flipkart did. Use our Holiday Checklist to determine what areas of your business could use reinforcing ahead of the seasonal surge, then check out our Holiday Promos if you need help with issues like migration or security.