The teams that helped Flipkart pull off Big Billion Days
E-commerce giant Flipkart saw over 55 per cent increase in new sellers in ‘The Big Billion Days’ (TBBD) festive sale event this year compared with last year.
The first week of online festive sales, where various e-commerce firms participated, saw 23 per cent year-over-year sales growth in 2021, with goods worth $4.6 billion (~32,000 crore) being sold online, according to a recent report by Redseer Consulting.
According to Redseer, the Flipkart Group emerged the leader during the festive sales with an impressive 64 per cent market share. Flipkart competes with players such as Amazon, Reliance’s Jiomart, and Tata CLIQ, the Tata Group’s e-commerce platform.
All of this was made possible by the various teams at Flipkart. These range from thousands of corporate employees and hundreds of thousands of people across the supply chain, to ecosystem partners who ensured safe delivery to customers.
“An event of the scale of Flipkart’s TBBD requires a tremendous amount of preparation,” said Krishna Raghavan, chief people officer, Flipkart. “What is important to acknowledge is the ‘peoplepowered machinery’ that brought the TBBD to life.”
Over the years, TBBD’S scale has increased. “Every year, millions of people from across India look forward to the festive season,” said Raghavan. “TBBD, which began as a shopping festival eight years ago, has transformed into an event of great magnitude today.”
As most people continue to work remotely, Flipkart laid down robust SOPS (standard operating procedures), defined critical resources, and expanded the talent pool to build resilience and ensure a clear backup in case of exigencies.
All important feature rollouts happened much before TBBD. There was a rigorous system and stress testing, along with bug fixing on new constructs. This was done so that the focus remained on a high-touch customer experience.
One of the team members who worked remotely on TBBD is Priyanka Nahata, a software development engineer at Flipkart. She is part of the team behind the ‘Explore Chat’ feature that seeks to provide users with an online personal shopping assistant with the help of a specially curated AI chatbot.
“We’ve been working on voice as a feature for almost a year now and had less than 5 languages live during last year’s TBBD,” said Nahata. “But this year we (had) more than 10 languages live.”
Another team member, Radhika Dhote, a senior manager at Flipkart Quick, played a role in managing the homepage experience for Flipkart Quick, a platform for daily use essentials and electronics.
“The Flipkart Quick journey began a little over a year ago and most of us in the team have never met in person because we all work remotely,” said Dhote.“as a result, there’s this extra effort that goes into the simplest of things — which has led to a strong outcome overall.”
Anubhav Agarwal, an associate director in grocery at the firm, said last year Flipkart Grocery was present only in 5 major metros.
Since then it has expanded to over 100 cities and is on track to reach more tier-2 and 3 markets by the end of the year.
“Despite the difficulties that the pandemic threw our way, we are proud of our grocery growth journey this past year,” said Agarwal. “For TBBD we worked hard towards building our presence in more than 100 cities.”
Another team member, Nishant Pradhan, a senior director in product and engineering at Flipkart played a key role in ensuring the best technology is integrated into various aspects of Flipkart’s large supply chain. “In a remote working world, Flipkart has enabled each of us to keep our collaboration levels consistently high,” said Pradhan.
For any e-commerce marketplace, delivery executives are the only ‘human’ touch points for customers. One such transportation partner for Flipkart is Nawaz Pasha from S L V
Enterprises, who runs over 200 trucks with Flipkart. While his business grew, the past year was challenging due to the pandemic. “We focused on ensuring employment, facilitating safe deliveries, providing financial support to our employees, enabling vaccinations and arranging isolation facilities as needed,” said Pasha.
Kirana stores too played an important role in this year’s BBD. Flipkart’s Kirana for Delivery Programme has 100,000 stores from across the country, enabling the delivery of millions of shipments during the festive season.
“Flipkart’s kirana delivery programme has played a pivotal role in bringing prosperity to small businessmen like me,” said Prasad from Amith Bakery in Bengaluru. “I run a bakery store with my brother and the additional income from Flipkart deliveries has contributed immensely to our growth.”