On a rainy day in October 2007, a man bought a book online. We caught up with the first Flipkart customer to hear his story.
Great beginnings are dramatic. The story of the first-ever sale on Flipkart
is a page-turner in itself, packing in a fair share of crisis and
climax, nail-biting tension and hot-wheels action, inclement weather,
borrowed money, a race against time, and a victorious finale. We caught
up with the first Flipkart customer to relive the memory of the sale
that changed the future of e-commerce in India.
8 years ago, a man from Mahabubnagar bought a book online. Page 1 of the @Flipkart story http://t.co/km4Vaz1oDw pic.twitter.com/Tn0t4us5ap— Flipkart Stories (@FlipkartStories) October 15, 2015
It was late October 2007. V V K Chandra lived in
Mahabubnagar, a town in undivided Andhra Pradesh that is now the
headquarters of the largest district in the new state of Telangana.
Chandra used to run a freelance web consultancy at the time. His
voracious appetite for books brought him frequently to Hyderabad, 90 km
away, where he combed the city’s famous bookstores for inspiration. But
even Hyderabad’s best didn’t stock the one book he craved – John Wood’s
memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change The World.
Chandra used to blog about technology and the
internet. Beneath one of his posts, a user who identified himself as
Sachin had left a comment with the link: www.flipkart.com.
“In
hindsight, I guess he was really marketing his site!” laughs Chandra,
who now works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Intrigued by the unfamiliar
link, he clicked, and found himself on a site that purported to sell
books and ship them anywhere in India. He hadn’t seen anything like it
before.
“The website looked decent. I won’t say it was
amazing,” recalls Chandra, who was then keenly following the startup
scene in India. “As a developer dreaming of launching a startup, I know
what used to make good websites those days. Most of the e-commerce
websites weren’t user-friendly.”
More importantly, the site stocked the book he wanted. He decided to luck it out.
“It was not an expensive book, just about ₹500. I could afford to risk losing that money,” Chandra recollects, chuckling.
He ordered. And waited.
A whoop of cheer went up in a small two-bedroom
apartment in Koramangala, Bangalore, where Flipkart had just taken its
baby steps. Nobody had yet made a purchase on the freshly unboxed
website. Co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, unrelated despite
the common surname, spent their interminable waking hours promoting
their new startup and feverishly scanning their inboxes for emails.
Chandra’s order was the very first.
Jubilation turned quickly to confusion, with a hint of panic. Leaving Microsoft seemed to be unavailable.
“We looked for the book for two days across 50
bookstores in Bangalore and even called up a few in Delhi and Mumbai,”
remembers Binny. He dashed off an email to Chandra.
Was Flipkart’s first sale going to be a damp squib? Tensions ran high.
“I finally spotted the book at Sapna Book Store in
Indiranagar,” Binny recalls. It was the last copy and it wasn’t exactly
in mint condition. “The pages were yellowish but thankfully they were
not torn,” he says.
Binny phoned Chandra to buy time. He couldn’t get through.
When
Chandra received Binny’s email he felt reassured. “I thought, at least
this is a real company,” he mused, recalling the episode. “I felt like I
could trust them.”
Chandra wanted the book so badly that he didn’t care if it wasn’t bookstore-fresh. He wrote:
History was one step away.
But
there was more drama in store. October in Bangalore is known for
torrential rains, waterlogged streets and traffic woes. All of which
makes riding a bike a reasonably heroic pursuit as many Bangaloreans on
two wheels will attest. At about five in the evening, soaking wet, Binny
arrived at the bookstore in Indiranagar. And realized that he had
forgotten his wallet. He went right back into the rain.
“I borrowed money from one of my roommates to pay for the book,” says Binny who returned to the bookstore to purchase the book.
On October 31, 2007, Chandra’s order was shipped.
Since November 1 was a state holiday in Karnataka on account of Kannada
Rajyothsava, the book reached him in Mahabubnagar the following day.
“Not
only did they deliver the book, they offered me a 10% discount for my
troubles,” says Chandra, who left a glowing customer testimonial that
was featured on the Flipkart home page for months to come:
The best Indian online book store I have ever seen. Fast and free shipping, discounts and a large number of titles. I could not have expected more. You guys really rock. Good luck.
Heartfelt praise from a young bookworm in Mahabubnagar who was spared the ordeal of a 90-km commute to Hyderabad.
That’s how Flipkart fulfilled its first wish.
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