These teams worked remotely to help Flipkart pull off Big Billion Days sale

E-commerce giant Flipkart had a very successful ‘The Big Billion Days’ (TBBD) festive sale event this year amid the pandemic. The event, which concluded recently, was conducted on a massive scale. It brought lakhs of sellers, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and kiranas closer to consumers this festive season. There was over 55 per cent growth in new sellers this TBBD, compared to 2020.

The first week of online festive sales, when various e-commerce firms participated, saw 23 per cent year-over-year sales growth in 2021. This means goods worth $4.6 billion (Rs 32,000 crore) have been sold online from brands and sellers during the festive sales, according to the latest report released by RedSeer Consulting. RedSeer says has been seen that Flipkart Group emerged as 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, Tata Group’s e-commerce platform, which are also betting big to tap the festive season.

All of this was made possible by various teams at Flipkart. These range from thousands of corporate employees and lakhs of people across the supply chain, to ecosystem partners that 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 ‘people-powered machinery’ that brought the TBBD to life.”

Over the years, the scale of operations for TBBD has increased. This is because millions of new users choose Flipkart for their shopping needs. Speed and agility are key, bearing in mind the volume of output that is expected in a few days’ time.

“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 this year, Flipkart laid down robust SOPs (standard operating procedures), defined critical resources, and expanded the talent pool compared to the previous years. This was done to build resilience and ensure a clear backup in case of exigencies. All important feature rollouts happened prior to the month that witnessed TBBD. There was a rigorous system and stress testing that happened, along with bug fixing on new constructs. This was done so that the focus remained on a high touch customer experience during the event.

One of the team members who worked remotely to enable TBBD to reach millions of people across the country 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. She is also a part of the Voice team that is working towards creating an inclusive experience for people across the country.

“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. She was involved in everything from how the page looks, optimising constructs on the page and effectively merchandising from a customer point of view.

“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.”

This year’s TBBD was the first such event for Dhote. As Flipkart works towards solving growing hyperlocal needs, Dhote and her team are consistently working towards building a unique experience. She said design is a key differentiator for them.

This year’s TBBD was the 8th edition for Renuka S, a senior director in the supply chain at Flipkart. She began her Flipkart journey in 2014 when she joined the city logistics team. She was entrusted with expanding the reach of e-commerce to the nook and corners of the country. From 2,500 pin codes at the time of joining, Renuka played a role in the team which expanded Flipkart’s supply chain reach.

“Working remotely did bring forth challenges because we understand that this (TBBD was) a marathon,” said Renuka. “Hence, we planned our staffing and processes to balance focus on all areas. The past year has tested us but we always rose to meet those challenges.”

Anubhav Agarwal, an associate director in Grocery at Flipkart is responsible for demand generation and platform marketing. He is working towards making Flipkart the platform of choice for buying groceries online. Last year, Flipkart Grocery was present only in 5 major metros. Since then it has expanded its services into over 100 cities and is on track to reach additional 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 when it comes to 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.

Flipkart has a nationwide network of modern technology-enabled fulfilment centres, sortation facilities, and delivery hubs. This complete supply chain is now end-to-end managed.

For any e-commerce marketplace, delivery executives are the only ‘human’ touchpoint for customers. They play a key role in building trust. These include doorstep open-box deliveries to QR (quick response) based payments and seamless product exchanges. In addition to delivery executives, transportation partners play a critical role in ensuring a seamless experience for every customer.

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.

Kiranas are another important part of the Flipkart ecosystem that played an important role in BBD. Flipkart’s Kirana for Delivery Programme has 100,000 Kiranas 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.”