Meesho Mega Blockbuster Sale: Here’s How We’re Gearing Up

It’s that time of the year again… Diwali, aka sale season!

Every year during this period, we one-up ourselves, and this time we are doing it bigger and better than ever before. We partnered with some of the biggest celebrities across India from Sourav Ganguly to Trisha Krishnan to promote our “Meesho Mega Blockbuster Sale”.

From tailor-making new features for our unique user base to re-architecturing our systems to perform at scale, there is a lot that our teams have toiled over in the last few months to deliver on this 10X hype.

Read on to learn more about how we are gearing up in the backend to deliver the festivities we promised.

Welcome, New Users

As a problem-first organisation, the first step we take while tackling any new challenge is identifying the right problems for relevant users. We have our tenured users anticipating the sale, and we have a host of new features planned for them.

But the “Meesho Mega Blockbuster Sale” will also inevitably lead many new users to the Meesho app. We anticipate a significant number of them to have zero experience in e-commerce. Using the right mode and language to communicate with them is crucial. Here are a few initiatives we are taking to make them feel at ease:

• Helping customers comprehend better — Anticipating and solving comprehension issues in the multiple stages of a new user’s journey in the app is important.
  (a) Using vernacular languages — To enable users who don’t use English as their primary language to shop on our platform, we scaled vernacular languages.
  (b) Using different modalities like voice — for customers who are not comfortable typing, voice is a very useful option. We made discovering this feature very intuitive.
• Helping customers discover relevant products — We invested in deciphering user purchase intent explicitly to take them to the right set of products on Meesho. We also enabled new users to find relevant products that appear in ads.

Bigger Offers, Better Deals

We pride ourselves on being a platform for Bharat users… Our suppliers are small business owners, and our users value the low prices we offer them. So, the question is, how do we outdo ourselves in offering the lowest prices for great quality products during the “Mega Blockbuster Sale”?

Firstly, we got our suppliers to get on board. With a sale as massive as the one we’re planning, their success is inevitable. They were happy to offer massive discounts and celebrate this festive season as the Meesho community.

Beyond this, our Product Managers (PMs) mapped out different ways to enhance the shopping experience of our users during sale days:

• Daily deals: We will refresh the products — sourced from thousands of sellers on our platform — that are on sale daily.
• Special additional offers: We’ve identified categories of special interest to certain cohorts of customers. These cohorts will get additional discounts on specific products.
• Bank tie-ups — We’ve partnered with various banks and neo-banks to ensure additional offers for every payment instrument.

You Want It, You Got It

Our offers, deals, and tie-ups are of little use unless they are reaching the eyes of our users. That was another important part of the puzzle that our PMs solved.

• Sticky elements — One of the best ways to have our users come on our app during sale days is to encourage the habit of opening the Meesho app on all days. We’ve been running quizzes and polls to keep them coming back daily while also reminding them with banners and posters that our sale days start on 23rd September.
• A festive homepage — Once the Mega Blockbuster Sale begins, the Meesho homepage will show a good mix of best-selling, new, and trending products. There will also be widgets for the “low price store” and personalised lists and categories.
• Simplify the selection process — We are onboarding and offering great discounts on new categories that our users will likely buy. Our Ranking and Personalisation team will also rank products for each user based on their preferences and top trends in that particular category.

Scaling for Sale Day

Our users are sufficiently excited about the Mega Blockbuster Sale, and our suppliers are all set to clean out their inventory. To ensure that our systems are ready to go tow to tow with demand, our Fulfilment & Experience (F&E) took the lead and worked closely with third-party logistics (3PL) partners.

Here are some of the most impressive improvements they made for the sale days:

• Cleared up zombie requests — We had quite a few product return requests stuck in the manifestation (the process of getting an airway bill number from the 3PL partner) queue due to a high number of retries. We held a massive cleanup drive of these requests, which were cannibalising the time to manifestation for other requests, and further added instrumentation and alerts to locate such issues in the future.
• Fast forward and Retry queues — We separated the return requests for manifestation into 2 — Fast Forward Queue (which processed first-time return requests with zero manifestation failures) and Retry Queue (which processed return requests that had seen manifestation failures), further helping reduce time to manifestation.
• Circuit breaker — Until recently, we had no fallback logic to automatically move return requests from one 3PL to another in case of breakages or other issues with a particular 3PL partner. We added a configurable logic into the system, wherein other 3PLs are tapped in when one 3PL starts to underperform.
• Dedicated API Endpoint for Reverse Manifestation — Our 3PL partners did not have a dedicated infrastructure to process return requests from Meesho, leading to delayed response time. We moved all 3PLs to dedicated infrastructure to handle Meesho returns. Additionally, we set up alerts for Product and Tech metrics to proactively monitor system breakage.

All these measures solved for response time and, by default, for response time spikes. We’re already seeing a lower manifestation error with this change and is sure to have an impact during sale days.

There you have it. These are some of the ways in which we are ensuring a great user experience for Meesho users during the Mega Blockbuster Sale 2022. Stay tuned to learn how we leverage sales days to make our suppliers more profitable.

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CREDITS

Inputs from: Tanya Batra, Neha Baliga, Narayan Tendulkar, and Gagan Mahajan

Creatives: Rahul Prakash (LinkedIn, Portfolio)