Xiami 2 bathces of sales definitely do not have 4000 and 6000 in quantity if you look at the time there were fully sold...

http://www.financetwitter.com/2014/05/xioa...es-gimmick.html

magine you go to supermarket, put two items in your shopping cart and proceed to cashier counter to make payment. Surprisingly, the cashier said “Sorry, No More Stock” and you see your shopping cart empty – Magic !!! That was what happened today at Xiaomi Malaysia store. Hundreds of furious messages have been bombarding its facebook page.

Xiaomi Malaysia facebook today boastfully claims its second flashsale of 6,000 units Mi3 smartphone and 5,000 units power bank were all sold out in 15 minutes. The supposedly sale was yesterday but due to technical problems which Xiaomi blamed on Amazon Werb Services, it was postponed to today. It generated tons of customers’ displeasure over a last minute change in the sale.

Last week, Xiaomi announced a jaw dropping 17 minutes sold-out for all its 4,000 units of Mi3 smartphones and 5,000 units of Mi Power Bank. It was a great success to Xiaomi, from 17 minutes to 15 minutes sell-out. But was it a genuine flash-sale, or simply a cheap marketing gimmick by the Chinese company to paint a rosy picture? Was there really a ready stockpile of 6,000 smartphones and 5,000 power bank?

The fact is, there won’t be any audit for such flash-sale stock claim. For all you know, there could be a fraction of stocks available for the sale. For the fun of it, we had tried to purchase 2 units of power bank. But the supposedly 5,000 power bank were sold out in less than 5-minutes. Looks more like 50 to 500 power bank were put on sale, instead of the allegedly 5,000 units.
   
But that was not the real problem. The actual problem was with Xiaomi store. First, there was a freaking terrible lag. Then, when you thought you managed to put in the items into the cart and proceed to check-out, the check-out page didn’t seem to appear. A snow-white page greet you and you wonder what had gone wrong. We kept hitting the refresh button for like 50 million times.

Just when you thought it was over, amazingly a page suddenly appeared asking you to re-login. Then, you saw another page asking you to fill up your shipping address. Yay, you were so freaking happy but then *Poof*, it says “Mi Power Bank is out of stock” (*grrr*). It was merely 12:05 pm. Seriously, if Apple Store were to behave like Xiaomi Store, the company would have gone bust centuries ago (*grin*).
     



From yesterday’s 39,000 facebook likes, it had jumped to 43,000 today. Assuming all of them logged in to purchase today, it simply means Xiaomi Store can’t handle such a small amount of transactions. Like it or not, their servers suck big time. A crawling server together with limited gimmick number of units put on sale and voila – you can boast about a sold-out flashsale in 15-minutes, genius!!!

There’s also a loophole in Xiaomi’s buying guide. One order can consists of maximum 1 phone and 2 accessories. But one account can submit multiple orders. In another words, big boy scumbags from LowYat can deploy an army of workers hogging the traffic buying all the available units before selling it at marked-up price. You didn’t think those hundreds of stalls in LowYat belong to hundreds of owners, do you?

Nevertheless, consumers shouldn’t get upset if they couldn’t get their Xiaomi products. It was a pure marketing gimmick by the Chinese company to begin with. Nobody can audit and verify that there were indeed 5,000 units power bank or 6,000 units smartphone put on sale. It was like how Tesco advertised a RM10 for a unit of pendrive. When you reach there, poof, all sold out because only 10 units were made available.

Just wait for the stocks to come next month. Besides, this flashsale was not any cheaper compare to the actual unit when it’s made available to the public later.There’re other brands beside Xiaomi. Don’t let them squeeze your balls, as if it’s the end of the world if you couldn’t get their units. They should be desperate for your sales instead of you begging for their products.