Xiaomi has forayed into the television segment with the launch of Mi LED TV 4 in India for Rs 39,999. With an impressive array of features and a very attractive price, the sale of the TV was widely anticipated to do well yesterday, when it was scheduled to go up for sale on Flipkart. As it turned out, the sale played out to a now familiar script, announcement, followed by a press release in a few hours declaring the sale a huge success. With no details on the actual numbers sold.
This time Xiaomi used its official Twitter handle to make the expected announcement. That the Mi LED TV 4 was sold out in 10 seconds. Yes, you read that right. 10 seconds. With no numbers available, we decided to try and find out just how this is possible.
Quite simply, we don’t believe the hype anymore. For very practical reasons. Buying a product on an e-commerce is simply not a 10-second job for a common man. Therefore, we started an investigation into this matter and found out that it takes more than 10 seconds for a typical user to buy a new product on an e-commerce platform. Hence, few essential questions were felt unanswered during the flash sale of the Xiaomi Mi LED TV.
Xiaomi Mi LED TV gone in 10 seconds! But How?: Video
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Note: At the time of writing the Xiaomi Mi LED TV was sold out, so we took another Xiaomi product, the Redmi Note 4, to record the overall time taken for a user to find and buy the product on Flipkart.
To start with, we logged in to Flipkart website, and we filled all the necessary information like Address, card details and more in advance, as you would expect a really keen buyer to do for a flash sale. We then went on and bought the new product from Flipkart and found out that even when we fill all the details beforehand, it took us 30 seconds to buy the product from e-commerce platform. You can see the same in the video (above). For a regular user, the time taken to find a new device, fill all the necessary details and buying it, is much higher.
So, this raises many eyebrows. How it is possible for someone to book a product, in this case, Xiaomi Mi LED TV, within 10 seconds. Unfortunately, the closest sale of the same magnitude or with strong demand that happens every day is the sale of Tatkal tickets on the Indian Railways site. And even there, as it turns out, an actual successful purchase takes over 30 seconds, or alternatively, a software that gamed the system as it turned out. Now that’s a possibility we would like to discount when it comes to Flipkart. What do you think?