Flipkart’s The Big Billion Day – a pricing SCAM?

Flipkart recently announced The Big Billion Day sale on 6th October 2014 as an equivalent to the Black Friday sale in the USA. Lots of people are excited about it. They claim to give 30%-90% discounts on most products. They claim some of the categories of products on sale are clothing, perfumes, phones, laptops, etc. So I decided to check out whether these claims of discount is real or not. Thanks to “Compare Hatke” chrome extension from BuyHatke, we can understand how the prices were in the last few days and whether they have suddenly increased or not! I’m taking totally unrelated items to show the price comparison here..

Swayam Doublesheet which has been consistent at around Rs.1124 for over a month now, has suddenly shot up to Rs.1500. Tomorrow they might show a 30% discount and reduce it to original price!

Van Heusen Slim Fit Men’s trousers which were hovering between Rs.1200 to Rs.1700 in the last 1 month have suddenly shot up to Rs.2200 in just 1 day! Cool technique to show people a huge Rs.500 discount on their favorite trousers on 6th October??!!

One of the best selling perfumes, Calvin Klein Be Eau de Toilette, had its price hovering around Rs.1650 for the last 3 months, suddenly it has shot up by around Rs.300 and is now available at Rs.1920.. Even Compare Hatke chrome extension which doesn’t know about this pseudo sale is suggesting only around 40% of the time to buy this product at the current price as they know prices might come down soon!

I have not even scratched the surface of this issue as I’m just looking at the price fluctuations on Flipkart site itself. There have been many instances (in fact in the above screenshots itself) where it was mentioned by Compare Hatke that cheaper products are available on Ebay, Amazon and well Flipkart itself before they discontinued older priced products! But the shocking fact was the above image of a Soch sari which is exorbitantly priced on Flipkart site when the same can be bought for less than half the price on Soch website itself. What kind of discounts are you talking about then, Flipkart?

Like they say, being well informed is to be empowered. So don’t fall for the marketing trap and ensure that you make the right decision while buying the products, be it The Billion Day or Diwali Dhamaka Week!