Micromax's Yu Yureka Courts Controversy Over Number of Units Sold in First Flash Sale

On Tuesday, Micromax's Yu Yureka smartphone went on sale for the first time and Yu Televentures, a subsidiary of Micromax says it offered 10,000 units for sale via Amazon India. However, it is now being alleged that only 3,000 units were even available, and even fewer were actually sold.

The Yu Yureka is based on the Cyanogen OS, and went on sale exclusively on Amazon India. The company announced early closure of registrations dues to "overwhelming response", claiming over 3 lakh registrations for the flash sale.

(Also see: Micromax's Yu Yureka Review | Pictures)

After the sale yesterday, it was announced that 10,000 units went out of stock in 3 seconds. The quick close of the sale also generated plenty of negative sentiment online with many prospective buyers turning to Twitter to vent after failing to get their hands on a unit.

One consumer claims to have noticed something which, if true, would mean Yu has misled people.

Blogger Abhay Rana posts that only 3,000 units were available for sale, and that only 2,657 were actually sold. On his blog, Rana shared details about the lightning deal which are available if you invoke Amazon's API, showing that only 3,000 units were available, and only 88 percent were claimed.

He verified this using Amazon's Deals API, which bloggers can use to showcase deals on their site, to earn from referral links. When we checked the third party site Rana used to see the results, we saw the following information on this page:

"dealState": "EXPIRED",

"lastUpdated": 1421144479205,

"msCacheTtl": 15000,

"percentClaimed": 88,

"totalCouponCount": 3000

The Hurl site is used for demonstrating APIs, and the steps that Rana has listed appear legitimate, however, there is plenty of scope for missed details here. We reached out to both Yu and Amazon on Tuesday evening, when the story first broke, to clear up the issue.

While a spokesperson from Yu categorically denied the suggestion that less than 10,000 units were sold, we were told that more information would come when the units are shipped. We contacted multiple Amazon India spokespersons, but have gotten no response at the time of writing this report, nearly 24 hours after we got in touch.

While it is possible that there were multiple deal codes, or some other technical reason why it appears that only 3,000 units were sold, it appears as if the blogger is correct about this matter, unless Yu or Amazon can produce some more information showing the details of the phones sold.