Tip: How to get a Xiaomi merchandise at the Flipkart flash sale

With the recent craze of the Xiaomi smartphones, Flipkart has been in the limelight for all the good and bad reasons. People complaining that they cannot get through the sale and passing it as a scam, to many others who are happy to get their hands on one piece, Flipkart has been in the centre of the chaos.

Well, Flipkart selling Xiaomi handsets doesn’t look like a scam—we know a couple of them who did get lucky with a handset each. With 200,000 people waiting for that 

 button sharp at 2 PM at each sale, 20,000 clicks in one second are highly possible. This is the main reason Flipkart has managed to exhaust an inventory of a whopping 20,000 Mi 3 handsets within 3 seconds each sale.

Well, we can give you a few tips on how you can get you hands on a Xiaomi Redmi Note handset, but do not guarantee it altogether. However, with the past experience of how the flash sale at Flipkart works and inputs from various buyers, we can give you some possible tips with a fair chance of getting one. Once you have registered, all you need to do is wait till the countdown ends.

Here is what you can do. Get yourself ready 15 minutes before the 2 PM sale. Open around three to four different browsers. If you don’t have that many, then go ahead and install them now itself. You may choose from Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer, or any browser you wish. Open each one of them and tile them across your screen so that you can see all the windows together. Open the Flipkart website and login to your account on each one of them. Click on the respective page (www.flipkart.com/mi) where the sale will begin.

Closer to the 2 PM sale start, keep refreshing each window every 2 – 5 seconds so that you don’t miss the timer synchronization with the Flipkart server. When there is around 5 seconds remaining for the 2 PM sale, wait patiently and be alert. The moment you see the 

 button, move your mouse as fast as you can to hit on the button on all four browser windows. You should at least get past one of them if not more. If you are lucky, you should be able to get your hands on one handset.

The sale works like this — at the 2 PM clock, you need to hit the 

 button. Once added to your cart, Flipkart considers the handset sold. You then get up to eight hours (before 11:59 PM) after that to complete the payment. The customer does not have to pay immediately. If that was the case, buying the handset with all payment procedures would take more than 10 minutes to complete. And with almost 100,000 customers paying at once, the Flipkart payment gateway will either crash or get slower than usual. Hence Flipkart offers the customer to pay for the handset later (before 11:59 PM). This is the reason why 100,000 handsets can go ‘poof’ within a few seconds. Once a customer adds the handset to his cart, the handset is considered sold. 100,000 handsets can be added to shopping carts in just one second if more than 200,000 people are clicking at the same time (that’s just 10% of the entire stock).

Another tip is to use as many computers, tablets and mobiles, all up and ready to buy the handset you are waiting for. For that 10 minutes during the flash sale, request your friends, colleagues of family members to help you with that sale. Increasing the number of browser windows (via multiple browsers, tablets, PCs, mobiles, etc) you can increase the chances of getting a handset.

Just make sure you have all the browsers on the PCs, tablets and mobiles, you are using for the sale are ready on the Flipkart Note sale page and already logged in. Ensure you have a good internet bandwidth. A sluggish bandwidth will take longer to refresh the page and even slow down the data sent to the Flipkart servers. So, wish all the very best! The clock is ticking, so get your browsers ready for the 2 PM sale.