Sell anything to anyone, the mantra inside Amazon's festive sale war rooms

In the caffeine-fuelled festive sale battle for dominance in India's e-commerce space, Amazon drew first blood with its early access deals for loyal Prime customers. Just as the company was gearing up to open the sale to everyone in India last night, it said that Prime members had bought two times as many products in the first 10.5 hours of the sale when compared with the first day of its sale last year.

Employees who stayed all night monitoring the performance of Amazon's Great Indian Festival sale to ensure there are no glitches, were really hoping that the Prime early access sale was a small indicator of how big this year's sale will be. Most of them were looking tired with hectic activities along the day, but were hardly able to suppress the excitement. They know that the five-day long sale is a strong validation of nearly nine months of hard work they have put in building systems and processes to handle the peak loads during the sale.

“Prime Early Access (the amount of goods sold during this period) is already two times of what it was last year,” said Amit Agarwal, Country Manager for Amazon India, to a loud cheer from employees seated in one of the many war rooms setup at the company’s head office in Bengaluru. “A lot of hard work has gone into building all these features, so thank you everyone.”