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Early Flipkart found that Indian shoppers without credit cards, or who distrusted online payments, would not buy from an unknown website. Letting customers pay in cash at the doorstep removed that trust barrier and fueled growth. It also forced Flipkart to build its own delivery arm, Ekart, because third-party couriers could not reliably handle cash collection.
Indian foreign-investment rules barred foreign-funded companies from selling inventory directly to consumers. So Flipkart routed sales through nominally independent sellers such as WS Retail, which were in practice closely tied to the company. The legal form of the business was set by what regulators allowed, and that left a lasting fragility that later rule changes could exploit.
In the book's account, the discount war with Amazon pushed Flipkart into repeated large funding rounds that diluted Sachin and Binny Bansal and strengthened investors such as Tiger Global and SoftBank on the board. Dalal presents that dilution as one factor alongside management missteps, conflict between the founders, and the different choices each of them made. Together these left investors positioned to reshape leadership and steer the eventual sale to Walmart.
Flipkart's heavily promoted 2014 mega-sale drew record traffic and orders, but its systems buckled. Items went out of stock, prices glitched, and sites crashed, and the founders had to issue a public apology. The event showed that a scale-driven spectacle can prove demand while exposing that operations have not kept pace with marketing ambition.