Amazon Great Indian Festival / Flipkart Big Billion Day start from tomorrow.
My char-aana daan,
- It's a great time to buy stuff at a
discountedreasonable price. Other times, you are effectively paying more to subsidize these very sales. Whatever you wish to buy, add them to wishlists. And learn to wishlist if you are a newbie. Track your wishlists a few times daily. Track product prices through third party price trackers like keepa to understand what a reasonable price should look like. - Don't always mindlessly search through the flood of deals. Rather go to deal specialized websites like desidime to track some of the best deals. It's a forum just for tracking good deals across the internet.
- Usually, the sales last till the last day of the diwali (ie last week of the October). First batch of the sales is ending by Sep end but that means nothing. It will keep continue running in multiple batches.
- There's a chance that you might see a better deal in second or third batch of the sales. Am/fk hype first batch with all their might but you don't necessarily have to buy in the first batch of the sales.
- For every batch there'll be a new set of bank discounts + exchange bonus + other offers. Buy in the first batch only if your banks align with bank discounts. Eventually all banks will be given the chance.
- Great time to throw away old mobiles, appliances in exchanges as there will be good exchange bonus. Also keep in mind, the exchange values can change daily. If your old mobile is fetching 10k today doesn't mean it'll still go for that rate tomorrow. It could be worse or could be better. If you time it right, the you could be exchanging cheap old phones for their new price.
- It's good that we have 2 big marketplaces. Both marketplaces have horror stories. So don't be a fanboy for either. Go with which looks good at the time of purchase. Flipkart has remained the king in Diwali sales. It's traditionally been a go-to place for big priced items and amazon for less pricey and grocery items. It may be because flipkart search engine is neatly optimised for expensive items and is trash for cheap unbranded items whereas Amazon's case is the exact opposite.
- Both websites have plenty of fake reviews. If you see a headphone with ratings more than 4.5 stars, the reviews/ratings are fake/paid. People aren't going rate iphone 5 star even if you give it for free. Culturally Indians never give full marks. Many known brands are faking the reviews these days. Fake/paid reviews have become a part of the business like filing tax returns, nothing new. If you find fake reviews on one of the brand products, chances are that you will find fake reviews on rest of their products too. Not all Indians know good English. So if you see unreasonably high number of 5 star reviews with fluent english, praising the brand and with plenty of photos, those reviews are fake. There are many other ways to manipulate the listings. If you see 4 year old feedbacks on product you know released just last month, those are manipulated listings. Sellers can get away with such manipulations because common sense isn't common anymore.
- Flipkart super coins are a great way to save more money. There are plenty supercoin offers where you could get like 2k off on washing machines, TVs and what not. Check the supercoin section. Myntra has its own super coin offers. No idea what Amazon is doing with its diamonds.
- Pre Feed your address and payment cards. Some banks like ICICICICI or axis provide additional permanent virtual cards. These cards can fetch additional discount. You don't have to group all of the products in one single purchase if it's not going to fetch any additional discount. You may very well separate your products in different batches of purchases so that you can keep using different cards for the discount. Secondly, during the sale, there's a slightly higher chance of getting your package damaged or returned. If one of the product in your package gets damaged, they are going to return the whole package which may even consist 10 other products. And you might not able to claim those discounts for the next purchase.
- Before placing high value purchase through am/fk, do check other websites too. Chroma, vijay sales, jio mart, tata cliq, reliance digital etc. They will also have similar sales going on with different set of banks. I have seen Chroma offline store offering 10% off on a dozen different banks at the same time. I don't know about others but Mi offline stores price match to online prices. If some mobile gets OOS online, there are still some options offline.
- Shoot your unboxings especially if it's a high priced items. I can't stress this enough. It doesn't matter where you buy your products. Shoot your unboxings folks or be ready to get your return/replacement claims rejected.
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