Groupon India sells Onion. Traffic crashes site.
america.aljazeera.com
america.aljazeera.com
Firstly, selling any commodity for 10-15% of its market value will attract lots of opportunistic buyers. This isn't an "Indian" thing. You could try this in other countries by selling, say, Kale or Chicken Breast or Soylent, and people would still sign up. A deal's a deal in every country.
Secondly, Groupon was selling 3000 kg per day, with a limit of 1 kg per order. Some sites mention they sold out the first day within 80 minutes. Other than that, I haven't seen any evidence/data about the incoming traffic that caused the site to crash. So till I do, I'll treat news of the "crash" like a marketing gimmick from the company.
Lastly, as other folks have commented, Groupon India isn't exactly the platinum standard for ecommerce website design or operations in India.
In 2011, they (specifically, the Indian company they acquired and later folded into Groupon India) leaked 300,000 user passwords that were stored as cleartext (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/28/groupon_india_privac...)
The same year they decided to rebrand themselves to Crazeal.com (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/03/no-groupon-in-india-company...), only to re-re-brand themselves as Groupon India in Nov 2012 (http://www.afaqs.com/news/company_briefs/?id=55477_Groupon+I...)
Given this history - of poor design, senseless acquisitions and multiple u-turns in strategy - I wouldn't be surprised if their code is a taped-up patchwork that will crash regardless of 90% discounted onions.
Can you qualify your comments with what is good design, sensible acquisitions and what you'd call the "correct" strategy? Have you ever started or steered a company that went on to become something? Even half as big and inspirational as Groupon?
[Edited]
Senseless acquisition = entering a fast-growing market like India by acquiring a 2nd or 3rd tier player like SoSasta.com(http://www.techinasia.com/groupon-india/). Instead, they should either have entered directly, or bought out a leading player.
Multiple u-turns in strategy = going from SoSasta.com to Crazeal.com to Groupon.in in the space of 2 years, without any traffic or revenue results to show for it.
I'll ignore your last question asking about my qualification to comment. Because it has no relevance at HN.
This is a terrible line of argument, since it considers the possibility of problems being obvious even to a layman as nonexistent. The next time you're tempted to make such an argument, ask yourself: "Have i ever made a full-length feature film?" I'm sure the answer for yourself is no, yet you have surely criticized one.
He died on April 4, 2013.
But anyway, your point still stands aside from the small Ebert error.
Depends on you feel about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll and homicidal transvestites. Worth catching as a cultural artifact. Cringe-level is very, very high for 2013 viewer.
Its groupon, what is groupon if not a marketing ploy?
> Firstly, selling any commodity for 10-15% of its market value will attract lots of opportunistic buyers....
Well yea, thats the whole idea of groupon, the news here is that an onion sale crashed their site, that is funny to westerners because, well, its onions.
> Secondly, Groupon was selling 3000 kg per day, with a limit of 1 kg per order. Some sites mention they sold out the first day within 80 minutes. Other than that, I haven't seen any evidence/data about the incoming traffic that caused the site to crash. So till I do, I'll treat news of the "crash" like a marketing gimmick from the company.
If you check the listing, http://www.groupon.co.in/deals/shopping/Groupon-India-Onion/...
You'll see they already have a large amount of press about the sale, I believe the crash is less a marketing gimmick, and more is a result of one.
The "crash" if you beleive this source, was only for 10 or so minutes. Which is well within reasonable belief imo.
"The first day itself we ended up selling 5,000kg. Today (Friday) our site crashed completely for 10 minutes. It's been absolutely fantastic."
http://news.insing.com/feature/sold-out-onions-fly-off-india...
> Given this history - of poor design, senseless acquisitions and multiple u-turns in strategy - I wouldn't be surprised if their code is a taped-up patchwork that will crash regardless of 90% discounted onions.
I don't even know how this is relevant to the story or has anything to do with this discussion.
R u just mad cause you can't move that much onion?
I remember a company introducing a new orange flavored drink coming out with an offer where they'd give the drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges.
Oranges across the city sold out.
If it was just a packing problem, it's easy enough for me to ship you an empty hard drive mailing carton with pre-paid return postage.
As for SSDs, well, I'm generally more suspicious of SSDs. They are more shock resistant, but I've got north of a decade watching how hard drives fail. I've got a reasonable feel for it. SSDs? I am less familiar with. They /do/ fail just like any other drive; not only after you've written them X times. (I mean, they have that problem, too... but this idea that a ssd is more reliable because it's got no moving parts is bunk. You still need your raid.)
The problem I see is twofold.
1. if I'm buying thousands of hard drives, I can probably get 'em cheaper than you can.
and
2. if we're talking any hard drive you have laying about, (in which case, yeah, it might be 'cheaper' in that you don't want the hard drive anymore, and the effort of selling it is a large portion of it's value) well, then you have the problem of a bunch of different kinds of hard drives, which increases the complexity of your system.
Now, you could make some sort of minimum requirements (e.g. must be from vendor X, Y or Z, must be at least 7200rpm, must be at least 3tb, must be 'raid edition' etc...) and that /might/ work... it'd still be hard to overcome problem 1. (I suppose it would be a reasonable way to exploit 'loss leader' 'limit one' sales, but those are mostly for consumer-grade drives.)
By the way, Apple replaced it free of charge, outside warranty.
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512B...
Yup, looks like the samsung pro stuff also has a three year warranty.
I strongly suspect a similar market will shortly exist for aged out SSD. Once a SSD dies, simply modify its bios to report its brand new and error free, and sell it at full price on CL / ebay / etc.
I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers.
One "obvious" startup idea is no one who knows anything about RAID ever voluntarily builds an array with identical models / sequential serial numbers. However that is the only way big integrators will ship servers.
I'd be willing to eat a modest fee (aka a profit for a startup) for someone, somehow, to help me end up with an array of extremely non-identical drives. I have no idea how to work this. A swap operation? A trading site?
Maybe if you assume you want to replace an entire array every X years, and you've got Y drives, a subscription service sends you (Y/X) "currently top of the line" drives per year and you swap them in and expand the array as possible, as now unused space becomes available? There's subscription services for everything from "fruit of the month" to "mens underwear" so I think there's a possibility for raid admins to subscribe and save a new drive every 3 months or whatever, and due to labor costs of failure, businesses are not going to flip out at a somewhat higher profit margin. The killer problem with a subscription startup service like this would be customer support handing turnover at the enduser aka mailing address, and publicity. This service might exist, or existed in the past, but I've been in the biz a long time and never heard of it, so I find that highly unlikely unless the one attempt years ago was an epic fail. Aside from big biz, at least some small admins would subscribe, so don't forget about us guys with TB scale mythtv installations at home. I mirror and would like a yearly replacement cycle (because I have the dough and don't enjoy recovery as a hobby) so send me a top of the line big SATA every six months for 10%, do all the research (maybe burn-in testing) to save me the time, and I'll not blink at a "modest" markup, say under 100%.
>I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers.
I know that practice is thriving in the spinning rust market. Usually the drives are relabeled as some brand you've never heard of, but sometimes not. I've been burned when I was younger and cheaper.
(note, I've never seen a drive sold as a larger drive, as is common with SD cards... but that's 'cause filling the drive is a very standard minimum test for a hard drive. Generally speaking, these are drives with a bunch of bad sectors that are 're-mapped')
To prevent this sort of thing, standard procedure, when dealing with used drives, is to ask for the serial number. With that info, you can go to the western digital or seagate website and check the warranty status. If it's got a warranty, they probably haven't screwed with the firmware to make a bad drive look good (because why would you, when you can return it to the manufacturer and get an actual good drive.)
If the drive isn't under warranty, don't buy it unless your time is free. If your time is free, don't buy it even then, unless you trust the seller a lot and are willing to spend a lot of effort on burn-in during the period where the seller will accept returns.
Warranty service for both Seagate and western digital is very good. It doesn't matter how you got your hands on the drive; if it's within warranty, you can ship it back and they send you a working refurb (often of a newer model, if you ship back an old drive.) Same is true for initial manufacturing defects. /never/ return a drive to a retailer (unless you are getting a refund, not an exchange) - when you exchange a drive at a retailer, they just give you the drive that the last guy exchanged. Send it to the manufacturer; they actually know how to test the things.
>Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.
Why just not eat the oranges?
That's a nice blot on the environment. Burning fuel for delivering 1 Kg of onions to scattered destinations all over the country, brilliant idea, though not that conscious. Onion is something you can easily buy from the shop around the corner. And saving a few bucks won't change your living standard. People are ordering for fun.
On the other hand, offering discounted mobile recharge would have been eco friendly. But that's not the burning topic amongst a country that's obsessed with bargains :)
Great way to demonstrate first world myopia.
A large portion of the people in India live on no more than a few bucks per day. To them, this can be the difference between being well-fed and going hungry. Which is the biggest possible change in living standard.
The ones who are living on a few bucks a day aren't the ones logging on to groupon at 1pm to compete for those onion prices for the 10 minutes that it lasted. Neither do they have broadband, credit cards, netbanking. Neither are they the target consumer for groupon.
As for going hungry one Kg even eaten raw is less bulk than you'd think.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/28/20228605-enoug...
The cost of a pound of onions has risen from around 9 rupees (13 cents) to an average of 45 rupees (65 cents) in the last month alone. The shortage is front-page news in the country, where high onion prices have been credited with swinging elections in the past.
"We all need onions,” businessman Pradeep Kohli said. “My dining table is incomplete without onions, they're used in all Indian dishes and salads. What do we do if we can't have onions? It's a worrying time.”
Longer answer: see below.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/are-high-vegetab...
"According to Government data, India’s onion output in 2012-13 at 16.65 million tonnes, wasn’t much below the record 17.51 million of the previous year. Also, the fact that prices at Lasalgaon, Maharashtra’s and Asia’s largest onion market, averaged Rs 8 to 8.50 a kg till mid-May shows the crop wasn’t bad. What, then, explains the same Lasalgaon prices now touching Rs 45/kg?
"The last time when wholesale prices rose so much — consumers paid Rs 100 then — was in early January 2011. But that was a year when crop in South India was hit, especially by floods in Andhra Pradesh. The country’s entire requirement had to, then, be met from stored Maharashtra onions, allowing the traders at Lasalgaon to make a killing. But this time round, no such production disruption has happened; the kharif crop from the South is yet to be harvested.
"It only points to the power of traders, who would have bought at Rs 8 in early-May and stored to create artificial scarcity after July — when crop arrivals stop and the festival season takes off with Ramzan/Id-ul-Fitr!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%5B%5B2003%2C+5750...
So production almost doubled since 2004. Data from:
http://agriexchange.apeda.gov.in/India%20Production/India_Pr...
So presumably India should be flush with onions, unless I missed something and demand for onions also doubled. How could traders corner the markt in that situation?
For example, in my own little world of 100 odd Facebook friends roughly 18 voted for the ruling party and only 26% of my friends voted. So you can imagine, we the people brought it on ourselves. And we have been doing it for a couple of decades. Like it or not, this is exactly how karma or lack of it comes back at you.
During the days of coalition Indian governments with more colors than a rainbow, they kept telling that all problems were due to lack of clear mandate. Fine, the current ruling party literally got the clearest mandate in decades - the people got record breaking scams/all time high prices in return.
And before you chastise the voter for voting based on caste/religion and not voting on policy issues, the twice elected American government purported to represent the opposite of christian-fundamentalist-gun-toting-nutbags, has broken several of its promises and has indulged in significant domestic and foreign transgressions. This is not a problem unique to third world.
If you only have the option of choosing between jerks and assholes, your voting (or not) won't make much difference.
Disagreed. There are two more options that you probably missed:
1. Inform the election commissioner that you do not support any of the competing parties with your [reasons] on the ballot paper. Aka in tell the election commissioner that you need/expect better options.
2. Form a political frontier which provides an honest option to people who want to vote.
> ... the twice elected American government purported to represent the opposite of christian-fundamentalist-gun-toting-nutbags, has broken several of its promises and has indulged in significant domestic and foreign transgressions. This is not a problem unique to third world.
Doesn't justify the problems of India. This has nothing to do with the "third world" status, I agree with you there.
It's like a self-check you can run every time you want to comment...
The problem of overstocking to artificially create scarcity and then bend the prices over (of onions or rice or tomatoes) to profit quickly is such an age-old problem that has stuck around in India since the independence. It works like the crude oil industry and works like a charm. Every time. There have never been any convictions or efforts reported on "fixing it".
No one even remotely seems close or interested (I could be wrong here) in thinking up a solution or to get involved in solving it. Thus, the LOL.
But seriously, isn't this how Groupon is supposed to work? Offer a stupid discount, protected by a limited supply in order to manufacture demand.
I'm not sure why this is top of HN?
It's as piece of marketing by Groupon, at the end of the day, and a reasonably clever one, hence it's on HN.
Oh god no, that is economic history revisionism. Globalisation is first and foremost the method for rich countries/companies to outsource their workload to a cheaper provider. This is what it has become.
In the begining globalisation was about information and tech. exchange, a larger trade market and allowing people to move easily thought frontiers. Never, and still not, about fair trade.
You can't equalize level of life without social rights and globalisation don't push for that (especially in the US where globalisation is mistaken for global free-market).
The largest result of globalization has been dramatically raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
"You can't equalize level of life without social rights and globalisation don't push for that"
When you raise people's standards of living they begin to demand their own social rights.
>The largest result of globalization has been dramatically raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
Doesn't change anything to the fact that it wasn't intended. Companies promoting globalisation aren't doing it to raise standard issues of living. Quite the contrary.
>> "You can't equalize level of life without social rights and globalisation don't push for that"
> When you raise people's standards of living they begin to demand their own social rights.
Same as above. Once the economic situation has been enhanced it will not bring social rights unless people (almose litteraly) fight for it. Globalisation by itself doesn't guarantee social rights because it's not architectured to do so.
Moreover: people with low standard of living still demand for social rights (see brazilian tribes, north american natives, etc.) even when they can't participate in a more rewarding economy.
That's a straw man no one is claiming. A lot of non-companies did promote this aspect of it though (see below).
"Doesn't change anything to the fact that it wasn't intended. "
It certainly was intended by many who promoted it. Here's Paul Krugman in 1997:
The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
"Once the economic situation has been enhanced it will not bring social rights unless people (almost literally) fight for it"
Some social rights, like the increased standing of women, come naturally with economic benefits. Others, as said above, will be increasingly demanded by an empowered middle class looking to defending their property against injustice. In some cases yes they may have to fight for some of those rights. How exactly are you proposing they get these rights, click their heels together and hope?
"Globalisation by itself doesn't guarantee social rights"
Straw man claimed by no one.
What alternative is there that you're offering and what contemporary example can you offer to rebut the transformations of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and more into much freer societies?
though I'm not sure why any supplier in their right mind would sell via groupon at a discount when therr is massive price inflation for it. It's grown faster than the price of gold hence its probably driving the gold price!