NEW DELHI: Indian shopping site Flipkart crashed temporarily on Tuesday, minutes after Xiaomi's Mi 3 went on sale, as customers rushed to order the Chinese vendor's much-awaited Rs13,999 smartphone. The phone, which is only being offered through the site, was sold out in under 40 minutes, according to Xiaomi.At around noon, when sales began, Flipkart site showed a 404 error, meaning the webpage wasn't found. An hour later it showed an out-ofstock message on the page promoting the device.
The price offered by the online retailer is about Rs1,000 lower than the Rs14,999 Xiaomi had announced at the launch earlier in the month. According to Xiaomi's Facebook page Mi India, the company got more than 100,000 registrations until July 21 from people seeking to purchase the Mi 3.
The Flipkart site said registrations for the phone will restart on July 28 and sales at noon on July 29. "The demand is much higher than anticipated. We have already started work on ramping up the supply chain to meet the demand for the Mi 3 and for other devices. We are still figuring out ways to handle the future demand," Manu Kumar Jain, head of Indian operations at Xiaomi told ET.
"We will ensure that customers who missed out on today's sale are automatically registered to buy a Mi 3 on 29th," Jain added.
In a separate statement, Flipkart said the company had anticipated a traffic spike and scaled up its services, but the number of customers who logged in immediately after the sale went live caused the process to slow down for a while. "We are expanding our capacity in order to provide a smoother shopping experience the next time."
The Flipkart website had previously experienced similar issues when it offered Motorola's Moto E smartphone for sale. That and the Moto G were launched in India solely through Flipkart.
Jain said the company is working with Flipkart to ensure the technical issues are resolved. "We underestimated the demand we would receive and we are taking steps to ramp up the supply as soon as possible."
Flipkart and Jain didn't comment on the number of units sold in India, but a person familiar with the matter said that Xiaomi has brought very low numbers under 10,000 of the smartphone to India. Jayanth Kolla, analyst founder at Convergence Catalyst, believes that bringing a small stock could be a part of Xiaomi's strategy to get the initial response.
"We have seen in China Xiaomi bringing in very low numbers of devices for the first three days just to get the feedback... It seems that the company's strategy is working for them," he said, adding that Xiaomi is targeting the urban audience.
The price of Rs13,999 pits Mi 3 against mid-segment devices such as the Moto G and BlackBerry's new Z3 device. The Moto G and the Moto E were big hits in India while Z3 is also having a decent run. Flipkart has sold close to one million Moto G smartphones in the country, an insider said.
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