MediumBusinesseconomics

E Commerce Sale Season Discount Economics Study

Added Jul 2026 3 design docs

Every festive season the same banners appear: seventy percent off, lowest price ever, deal live for the next four hours. Shoppers in India now spend thousands of crores in these few days, yet almost nobody records what a product actually cost the week before the sale banner went up. Economists call the number a shopper compares against the reference price, and when a seller quietly raises that reference just before a sale, a modest cut can be dressed up as a spectacular one. Checking whether the discount is real needs only patience, a fixed product list and daily observation.

The intern builds a fourteen-day price panel around one major sale event. Fifteen products matched across three shopping platforms are observed once a day at a fixed hour, and the roughly 630 records are logged and analysed in excel to separate the claimed discount from the true discount measured against the pre-sale median price. A short google-forms survey of forty shoppers captures what people believe they saved, and the findings become an eighteen page analytical report, a per-platform discount scorecard, and a shopper checklist card designed in canva.

Completing the project takes the intern through panel data collection, median versus mean reasoning, reference price effects, price dispersion measurement and the discipline of testing stated claims against evidence without overreaching. Retail analytics teams, category managers, consumer bodies and market research firms all do exactly this work, and a public repository holding an original sale-season price panel is a rare and memorable thing to put in front of a recruiter.

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