BENGALURU: Flipkart sold goods worth Rs 1,400 crore on Monday marking a new high for retail sales on a single day as India's ecommerce companies wooed customers with a plethora of offers in the ongoing festive sale season.Flipkart, which racked up a bulk of its sales in the smartphone category, has now surpassed the total gross sales it registered in previous versions of the so called "Big Billion Day" sale. In 2015, it said goods worth $300 million (Rs 2,000 crore) were sold in the entire five-day sale."This indeed is a historic moment," said Binny Bansal , chief executive officer of Flipkart who reckons that millions of new customers have been drawn to buying online through these sales. His company estimates that it registered five times more traffic than usual since the sales began on Sunday. These annual sales — typically a five-day event that all top ecommerce companies lay out for consumers — is turning out to be a bonanza and marks a culmination of months of internal planning and testing."We started preparations in effect from October 17-18 of last year after the festive sale season had ended," said Manish Tiwary, vice-president of category management at Amazon India. At Flipkart, a lot of pre-event testing took place including "loading, traffic, engineering as well as testing the offers," according to Smrithi Ravichandran, director of category design.Across town in a west Bengaluru suburb, Amazon too had its own share of pre-event huddles. Each vertical has a designated "war-room" in the office and these are manned at all hours by people with specific responsibility."They can take decisions on their own in case of any crisis," Tiwary said. Industry experts are of the view that the number of people shopping online in India has increased, and there have also been more categories on display this year.In addition, high-decibel advertising is also seen to have spurred buying behaviour among consumers. "This (sales of $200 million) is a very remarkable figure for a single day and is definitely the highest for any online of offline player," said Arvind Singhal, chairman, Technopak , a retail consulting firm."If Flipkart and Amazon are able to register more than 40% of the sales from last year, it means that they have captured the bulk of the market," he said.This year, the online retailers are also offering bigger stocks across categories. The size of Flipkart's total offerings of 40 million products this sale season is over two times that of last year, while at Amazon it is three-times the selection during the festive season in 2015 with over 80 million products."Our team went into the villages near Varanasi to meet with the weavers to source original Banarasi saris for the Big Billion Day ," said Panchali Upadhaya, senior director in the fashion vertical of Flipkart. "We also collaborated with some international brands, and the process of procuring some of the items was a logistical nightmare."Amazon India has been offering training sessions for delivery associates to ensure quality customer experience, and has set up over 100 delivery stations across the country to support last mile delivery programmes.