Pakistan’s leading e-commerce company, Daraz recently brought the highly anticipated 11.11 “Word’s Biggest Sale Day”. Ever since Ali Baba acquired Daraz.pk people were expecting the famous 11.11 sale to make its debut in Pakistan and that is exactly what is did last night. While it’s international variant sold products worth a whopping $3 billion in just 5 minutes of its annual shopping extravaganza, it was also met with a more than decent response in Pakistan.
How the e-commerce websites fared in Pakistan
The one-day sale was sponsored by Unilever, L’Oreal, P&G, Nestle, Mi, and PEL and HBL (the main financial partner). Many brands offered a special sale on their products, the most notable of which was the Chinese brand Xiaomi, which did heavy marketing on this occasion. Xiaomi’s sale continue for 12 hours and started at 12 am last night and it was a huge success for them. Other e-commerce websites that became a part of this included Sasta Ticket, Symbios.pk, Easypaisa 11.11 AppBash Discounts, Kapray 11.11 Sale!, Splash Pakistan 11.11, Daraz Gyara Gyara (11.11) Singles’ Day Sale, Ezbuy Pakistan 11.11 Singles’ Day Sale. In addition to this, customers could also avail up to 20% off additional discounts from bank partners HBL, Meezan Bank, Silk Bank, MCB and Bank Alfalah debit and credit card or Easypaisa wallet.
These brands experienced a huge influx of customers due to which some websites even went down. As soon as the sale kicked off Daraz.pk (website) crashed due to heavy traffic, making the online shopping experience for many, a painful one.
As good as this is for the e-commerce industry of Pakistan, a vital flaw that was made visible in all of this was that the maintenance of website was an issue since most of these website’s servers went down and could not handle the vast influx of customers thereby annoying many customers. In fact Xiaomi’s website mistore.pk once again went down last night and this has happened on more than one occasion.
How people reacted to it
There was a positive feedback from the public in general since the public has been devoid of such e-commerce sales especially since Amazon doesn’t ship to Pakistan. Customers were looking forward to a fully personalized shopping experience, mega deals and flash sales in addition to brand vouchers on their favorite brands.
Here are a few tweets about the sale.
However, there were some unpleasant experiences where some had issues with the pricing of the products on sale while others were frustrated with the website going down at a crucial point e.g. Xiaomi’s website going down irritated many people since many of them were amidst a purchase.
Some more tweets regarding the sale.
The frustration was made visible on Xiaomi’s official Facebook page, where many commented about their unpleasant experience on the website. However, a good news for the people is that, with Ali Baba now managing Pakistan’s biggest e-commerce website, many more exciting sales are yet to come.
