Snapdeal App Fest Fiasco: Yet Another Useless Discount Fest

We all know about the big billion day fiasco that took place last year – all the rage behind the unfulfilled promises and the disappointment that the consumers faced. We assumed retailers would learn from it and launch much better shopping fests.

Just like the Flipkart’s Big Billion Day Sale and Amazon’s Diwali Dhamaka, Snapdeal has now come up with Snapdeal App fest, promising heavy discounts and fascinating deals on electronics, home, apparels and many other categories. But as we got to know the last time around – what is promised and what is delivered is way different.

We now tell you how to demystify what is promised and what is being delivered to you.

So to get to know whether you are getting the right price or not you first need to understand what was the price of that product historically. To check out how decent this fest was we used the Buyhatke addon and Buyhatke mobile app, whose price comparison tool helps to compare the price trend for any product that is out for sale.

Lets have a look at some of the products available at major discounts at the Snapdeal App Fest.

So let’s take the example of this branded Puma gray sports shoes.

Click here to go to the product page

As you can see the above product is available at INR 2879. Now let’s look at the historical price trend for this product.

The price of the same shoes was INR 2160 on 24th Feb and earlier. The price was raised to reach INR 3359 and then was dropped to INR 2879.

Now its an app fest. So ya there would be discounts inside the app. The price inside the app is shown INR 2304. A lot many people would believe that this is the best price available.

But just 2 days back it was INR 2304.

So the other important bit while shopping is to know whether it is that portal which offers the best price or some other portal. That’s where price comparison kicks in.

Now Snapdeal had shown that there are iphones on which its offering the best prices.

Let’s look at iphone 6. So inside the Snapdeal app we found that the best price for iphone 6 was INR 46550. But the same product was getting sold for INR 44270 around that time. That product has now gone out of stock due to huge demand for it.

A price difference of close to INR 2300.

Here’s another example:

Click here to go to the product page

Taking a look at the price graph of the above product you can clearly see how the price of the product has been increased just few days before the upcoming sale.

This is not something new on which these ecommerce players are cashing upon, last year Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale was the perfect example of how to fool customers, and everyone would agree to that. Its a simple fact, while ecommerce is on its path to explode in India, and consumers are getting comfortable with shopping online, incidents like these are just putting a negative impact on the consumer’s mind, which, in long run, might affect their buying behaviour adversely.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.