Myntra sale: Unexpectedly high traffic led to technical glitches

NEW DELHI: Unexpectedly high traffic on Myntra's website led to glitches during the recent 'End of Reason Sale' conducted by the fashion e-tailer, a top executive said.

The glitch occurred in the afternoon when Myntra was scheduled to run its 90% exclusive sale on the second day. Customers were unable to log in to the website and were constantly greeted by error message stating "Cannot get/deals/events?"

The problem lasted for only 45 minutes, said Shamik Sharma, chief product and technology officer.

Technical problems like this have become a norm during highly publicised sales of e-commerce players, who have been using massive discounts at these events to entice customers and expand market share.

"I would say by and large our technical systems worked very well, except for the 45 minute period on the second day," Sharma told ET on the sidelines of the e-tailing & Travel Commerce Conference 2015 organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Traffic is completely unpredictable at such big sale events, he said. "You can plan for 10X, 20X and so on but the traffic still exceeds your expectations."

Sharma said since mobile technology is fairly new still - Myntra switched to a mobile-app-only mode in May - technical teams are still learning the nuances with every passing day.

"We are learning about the traffic patterns and are constantly working on to improve the user experience. With every passing big sale our systems are getting more and more reliable and better," he said. "In the course of next couple of years, you should start seeing a more robust system in place."

After switching to the mobile-only mode, Myntra saw a 10% fall in sales initially, which Sharma thinks was positive as, according to him, the worst case could have been 30%. This is because at the time it moved entirely to a mobile platform, 30% of Myntra's traffic was coming from desktops. But even then the share of traffic through PCs had been shrinking fast with mobiles becoming the preferred platform for customers to shop online - just a year ago Myntra was seeing just about 30% traffic from mobiles, which generated only 15% revenue.

Having only one model helps scale, Sharma said. "People do not realise that there is a lot of people working behind the mobile applications or a desktop site. Company's whole effort goes into managing them. There has to be a marketing department, a supply-chain department, cataloging and a whole bunch of things for each of these mediums. But when you focus on one medium only, all of the forces of the company comes together to build that one platform."

Over the past 30 days, Myntra made more revenue than what it had 30 days before making the switch, Sharma said. The reason, according to him, is a lot more people are coming to the portal on mobile devices now than what it lost on the desktop.

"There will be a set of users which we would lose for a temporary period of time, but over three to six months we expect our entire audience to come back," said Sharma.