Here is a listing you have definitely seen some version of: a kurti, ₹399, 85% OFF, MRP struck through at ₹2,699.

Now ask the obvious question. Was that kurti ever, anywhere, sold for ₹2,699? Did any human being walk into any shop and pay two thousand seven hundred rupees for it?

Almost certainly not. The ₹2,699 exists for one reason: so that ₹399 feels like a rescue.

This is the most widespread pricing trick in Indian online retail, and the uncomfortable part is that knowing about it doesn't automatically protect you. It works on people who know exactly how it works — including, embarrassingly, me. So it's worth understanding not just the mechanism but why our brains fall for it, because that's where the defence comes from.

How the trick actually works

MRP — maximum retail price — is supposed to be a ceiling. It's the highest price at which a product may legally be sold, printed by the manufacturer. That's the intent, and for products from established brands with real distribution, it broadly functions that way. A branded washing machine's MRP corresponds to something real.

The gap opens with goods where the seller is effectively the manufacturer, or where the supply chain is short and informal. Unbranded clothing, accessories, home decor, kitchen gadgets, jewellery. There, whoever lists the product decides the MRP. Nothing stops them writing ₹2,699 on an item they always intended to sell at ₹399. The "discount" was never a discount — it was the price, wearing a costume.

Look at how the same real price can be dressed three ways:

Identical product. Identical money leaving your account. Completely different emotional experience — and, measurably, completely different likelihood that you buy.

Why it works even on sceptics

The mechanism is anchoring. The first number your brain sees becomes the reference point for every number after it, and this happens automatically, below the level where scepticism operates. Once ₹2,699 has been seen, ₹399 isn't evaluated against "what is this worth?" — it's evaluated against ₹2,699. And against ₹2,699, it's magnificent.

You can know this and still feel it. That's what makes it robust. Knowing that the anchor is fake removes maybe half its force; it doesn't remove the pull. What actually defeats it is not willpower but replacing the comparison — giving your brain a different, real number to measure against. More on that in a moment.

There's a second effect stacked on top: urgency. Percentages are often paired with countdown timers and stock warnings. Anchoring makes the price feel good; urgency stops you from checking whether it is. The combination is much stronger than either half.

The regulation question, honestly

Consumer protection rules in India do prohibit misleading claims, including misleading discounts, and both regulators and platforms have taken action over the years. Enforcement is real but partial, and the practical situation for a shopper is straightforward: you cannot rely on the printed MRP of an unbranded product being meaningful. Treat it as marketing copy rather than information, and you'll be right far more often than wrong.

To be fair, plenty of discounts are entirely genuine. Festive-season electronics deals are usually real reductions against real prices. End-of-season fashion clearance is real. The trick isn't universal — it's concentrated in specific categories, and the tell is whether the MRP is plausible for that item in the physical world.

Five signals that a discount is theatre

1. The percentage is enormous. Genuine markdowns cluster in the 10–50% range because retail margins have limits. Consistent 70–90% off, outside genuine clearance, usually means the starting number was invented.

2. The MRP is implausible for the category. Ask whether a shop could sell this item at that price to a real person. A ₹2,699 unbranded kurti, a ₹4,999 phone case, a ₹1,899 plastic organiser. If the answer is obviously no, the number is decoration.

3. The discount never changes. Real prices move. If a listing has shown "80% off" continuously for two months, the sale price is simply the price.

4. Every item from that seller has the same discount. A whole catalogue at exactly 78% off is a pricing formula, not a series of independent commercial decisions.

5. The price is oddly precise while the MRP is round. ₹1,499 struck through, ₹387 selling. That pattern often means the selling price came from a real cost calculation and the MRP came from a spreadsheet.

The related trick: pre-sale price inflation

There's a cousin of the fake MRP that's harder to spot and, in some ways, more annoying.

In the weeks before a big sale event, some listings quietly rise. An item that sat at ₹1,800 for months drifts to ₹2,400. Then the sale arrives, the price becomes ₹1,749, and the badge reads "27% off". Technically accurate against last week's price. Practically meaningless, since ₹1,749 is barely better than the price you could have had a month earlier without any of the drama.

This is exactly why price history matters more than any badge. A price you personally recorded three weeks ago is an anchor that can't be manipulated. If you're planning to buy something in a festive sale, note the price today — a screenshot, a note on your phone, anything. That single number turns the entire sale from a mystery into a verifiable claim.

The habit that makes you immune

Everything above condenses into one rule, and it's almost aggressively simple:

Ignore the percentage. Compare the final price across stores.

The reason this works is that it replaces a fake anchor with a real one. You're no longer asking "is ₹399 good compared to ₹2,699?" — a question the seller wrote for you, with an answer built in. You're asking "is ₹399 good compared to ₹340 at the next store?" That question has an honest answer, and no seller controls it.

Once you've done this a few dozen times, something shifts. Discount badges stop registering as information. You look straight past them to the number that matters, the way you eventually stop hearing an air conditioner running. It becomes genuinely difficult to be manipulated by a percentage, not because you're being vigilant, but because you're not looking there any more.

What to do with the harder cases

Cross-store comparison is easy for branded goods with model numbers. It's harder for the exact category where fake MRPs are most common — unbranded items that exist under different names on different platforms.

For those, three fallbacks work reasonably well:

The other percentage games

Inflated MRP has relatives, and once you can see one you can see all of them.

"Up to 70% off". The phrase "up to" is carrying the entire sentence. It means one item somewhere in that collection is discounted 70%, and it's usually a single odd size in an unpopular colour. Everything else might be at 15%.

Bundle pricing. Two items sold together at a "combined saving", where one of them is something you'd never buy alone. The saving is calculated against the price of the item you didn't want, which is not a saving.

The strategic size. A brand sells a 900ml bottle at a price that looks fine against the 1-litre competitor, because comparing per-millilitre requires a step nobody takes at the shelf. This is the fake MRP's quieter cousin and it's everywhere in groceries and personal care.

"Lowest price ever." Occasionally true and easy to check if you have any price history at all, which is exactly why the claim depends on you not having any.

All four collapse under the same question: what does this actually cost, and what does the same thing cost elsewhere? Every pricing trick in retail is an attempt to make that question feel unnecessary.

A quick worked example

Say you want a specific pair of running shoes. Three listings:

Store A shouts loudest. Store B is the cheapest. Store C is second-cheapest but includes delivery, so if A and B each charge ₹80 shipping, the real order is B at ₹2,029, C at ₹2,050, A at ₹2,279. The listing with the biggest badge is the most expensive one — by ₹250 — and it is the one most people would click.

That's the whole lesson in one table. The percentage told you about the seller's marketing. The final price told you about your money.

Where this fits with what we do

Making that final-price comparison quick is the entire reason 7Compare exists. Search once, the engine checks nine Indian stores live, matches genuinely identical products and variants, and shows the actual selling price from each — sorted lowest first, with discount claims computed against the store's own stated MRP so you can see when a percentage is doing more work than the price is.

You still buy from the store, at the store's price. We just remove the excuse for skipping the comparison, because that comparison is the only thing standing between you and a very confident number that was made up.

Percentages lie. Final prices don't.