Flipkart’s website showed several errors Friday morning minutes after Motorola’s Moto E went on sale, when customers started to place orders for the popular Rs 6,999 smartphone.
At around 11am, Flipkart’s page where it showcases Moto E showed a 404 error, while around 12 noon, when one clicked on ‘Buy Now’ on the Moto E page with the message ‘Something went wrong, please try again’ popped up.
Flipkart executives did not respond to ET’s query seeking response on the glitch, at the time of writing this story.
This is the second time that Flipkart experienced glitches when it put up Moto E for sale. The marketplace provider said Thursday that it will resume shipping Moto E smartphones from Friday morning, following replenishment of stock from Motorola Mobility, after the popular device was sold out within two days of launch last week.
“Motorola’s Moto E smartphone will be back in stock on Flipkart.com from 11.00am onwards 23 May 2014,” the e-commerce company had said. About 20,000 devices have been shipped in the second lot.
Motorola Mobility sells its smartphones exclusively online through Flipkart in India. The e-commerce website ran out of stock soon after it started taking orders midnight between May 13th and 14th. It had reportedly stocked up between 80,000 and 100,000 units expecting them to last for a few days, but they were sold out in less than 48 hours after the Moto E went on sale in India.
The Moto E smartphone is priced at Rs 6,999 and is being seen as the competitor to sub Rs 10,000 smartphones from Samsung, Nokia, Micromax and Karbonn.
In an earlier interaction with ET, senior executives at Motorola Mobility said the orders had surpassed their highest expectations and the US-based company was arranging for a “significant” number of devices to be arranged from China soon.
Motorola’s corporate vice president Magnus Ahlqvist during the launch event said that the company was better prepared for Moto E, following stock outage within hours of the launch of its first device, Moto G, in late 2013, but this evidently didn’t prove enough.
The smartphone maker plans to continue with the same strategy of selling online even though off-line retailers are more than willing to sell its devices – Moto G, Moto X and Moto E – given their huge popularity.
