There were only 3000 devices on sale today, out of which only 2657 were claimed, after which the sale was shut down.

[Guest article by Abhay Rana. He has a few interesting findings on Yu’s flash sale that happened today on Amazon India. While the analysis is debatable, it definitely deserves a read!. While the analysis is debatable, it is definitely a great read!]

I was eagerly awaiting the release of Yu Yureka, which has been widely hailed as a great budget phone by most reviews. I won’t go into the details of the phone, but rather the flash sale that took place on 13th Jan ’15 (on amazon.in). Far from being a well-managed affair, the website was plagued with issues, and went down for everyone a couple of minutes before the sale.

Still, a few lucky people were able to buy the phone (sadly, I wasn’t one of them). Micromax said that they had to close registrations for the sale early and had around 3 lakh people lined up for the sale.

This is how the yuplaygod.com homepage looks right now:



Clearly, they had 10k units for sale, and one in every 300 people should have bought it, right? Wrong!

It seems Yu (the brand new subsidiary of Micromax) is not above lying. There were only 3000 devices on sale today, out of which only 2657 were claimed, after which the sale was shut down.

How do I know this? The way deals work on amazon is once you are on a deal page, the client keeps checking the deal status every few seconds so as to let you know as soon as its status changes. This deal status response does not only include the deal status code (say EXPIRED/SOLDOUT/AVAILABLE), but also includes the deal’s nitty details.

These details include:

totalCouponCount: 3000

claimedCouponCount: 2657

percentClaimed: 88

type: LIGHTNING_DEAL

title: Yureka

dealPrice: 8999

currentPrice: 12999

I’m not sure why Yu would try such a tactic (hype the device at low cost, overstate sales figures and then switch to a higher price), but it sure does not sound nice if you are one of the 3 lakh people who lined up to buy the device.

References

Since its my word against amazon, here’s a simple way to confirm the deal details for yourself:

Visit http://hurl.it/ (I don’t own this site) Change the request method to “POST” from “GET” Enter http://www.amazon.in/xa/dealcontent/v2/GetDealStatus where it says yourapihere.com Click on “+ Add Body Button” Paste {"requestMetadata":{"marketplaceID":"A21TJRUUN4KGV","clientID":"goldbox"},"dealTargets":[{"dealID":"ea9fef51","itemIDs":null}]} into the box that appears Click on “Launch Request” Scroll to the bottom to see the dealStatus

As an alternative, here is a permalink to the request on hurl.eu. As a precaution, I’m also uploading it on a gist here.

Here’s a better (edited) photo that Yu might wanna use:



[Reproduced from Abhay’s blog.]

Also see: Xiaomi did a similar ‘marketing gimmick’ with its flash sale on Flipkart.