Online retail giant Flipkart.com said it would resume shipping Moto E smartphones within 10 days as the e-tailer had run out of stock soon after it started taking orders. The new smartphone, recently launched in India, is priced at Rs 6,999.
Flipkart had stocked up 80,000-1 lakh units, but still couldn’t keep up with the demand. A Flipkart spokeswoman also confirmed that the Moto E stock was "entirely sold out.” According to her, the e-commerce firm is working with Motorola Mobility to get fresh stocks. "Customers can book their Moto E with us now and we will start shipping in 7-10 days," she said.
Motorola Mobility didn't reveal the order volume, but the company executives termed the market response as ‘positive.’
Senior Motorola Mobility executives said the orders were way above what they had expected and the US-based company was arranging for a ‘significant’ number of units to be shipped from China soon.
The huge demand had even temporarily crashed Flipkart's website.
"Based on the phenomenal response (we) saw with Moto G, we anticipated a big spike in midnight traffic for Moto E and we scaled up all our Web services accordingly. But the pace at which the Moto E purchases shot up at midnight caused the checkout process to slow down for about 30 minutes," the spokeswoman said. Flipkart later expanded its website’s capacity and got it restored by 12:30 am on Wednesday.
Motorola sells its products exclusively through Flipkart in India and it plans to continue with this policy.