Which sale discounts are actually real?
Planning to wait for the upcoming Flipkart or Amazon sale? See what happened last time. We checked our own records for 325 products across 2 festive seasons to find out how often the discounts were real.
The sales we have audited
Big Billion Days and the Great Indian Festival anchor the Indian festive sale calendar. Each page shows the season-by-season breakdown and names real tracked products on both sides of the result — the ones that were marked up first, and the ones where the discount was exactly what it looked like.
Flipkart Big Billion Days
183 products checked across 2025 and 2024. The next edition is expected in late September 2026.
- Beat pre-sale price
- 83%
- Marked up first
- 19%
Amazon Great Indian Festival
142 products checked across 2025 and 2024. The next edition is expected in late September 2026.
- Beat pre-sale price
- 73%
- Marked up first
- 20%
What two seasons of price records actually show
The popular version of this story is that festive sale discounts are theatre. Our own data says something more useful and less tidy.
The markup is real but uncommon
About one product in five got more expensive in the weeks before the sale. That is frequent enough to check every purchase and far too rare to assume about all of them.
The saving is usually real too
For 79% of products the lowest sale price genuinely beat what the product had cost the month before. The sales are worth shopping; the advertised percentage is just not the number to trust.
The advertised percentage is the weak link
Stores calculate discounts from list price. We calculate from the product's own recent selling price, which is the comparison that decides whether you are better off.
Timing matters less than you think
Several products hit their lowest price before the sale opened and never went lower during it. Waiting for a date is a worse strategy than watching a price.
Category beats store
Fashion and small electronics moved furthest in both seasons; large appliances moved least. Which store you buy from mattered less than what you were buying.
One product is not a trend
Every figure here is an average over hundreds of products. Your specific item can behave completely differently, which is the entire reason to look at its own chart.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Indian e-commerce sites really raise prices before big sales?
Some listings do, and the effect is real when it happens — but it is a minority pattern, not a universal one. Across 325 tracked products through the last two festive seasons, 19% were selling above their previous month's price in the weeks before the sale. The remaining four in five were flat or already falling.
So are festive sale discounts worth waiting for?
More often than not, yes. The lowest in-sale price beat the pre-sale price for 79% of the products we checked. The catch is that the advertised percentage is usually larger than the saving you actually make, because stores calculate it from the list price rather than the recent selling price.
When is the next Big Billion Days or Great Indian Festival?
Exact dates are only announced close to launch, but Flipkart Big Billion Days is expected in late September 2026 and Amazon Great Indian Festival around the same time — the two usually overlap. Start tracking the products you want now, so you have your own benchmark ready on day one.
Which sale gives the biggest genuine discounts?
In our records the Flipkart and Amazon festive sales run at the same time and land in the same place, with Flipkart showing slightly deeper genuine drops in both years we measured. Category matters more than store: fashion and small electronics move furthest, large appliances least.
How do I know if a specific sale price is a good one?
Track the product before the sale. Once a product is on your watchlist we record its price continuously, so on the day you have your own benchmark to compare the sale price against instead of the store's chosen reference price.
Can you tell whether a store inflated the MRP?
We record the selling price a shopper actually pays, not the struck-through MRP shown next to it. A listing whose MRP is inflated while its selling price stays put would not register here — so this audit can neither confirm nor rule out MRP inflation specifically.