The discounts given on e-commerce site (amazon, flipkart) are real or just a trickery?*
My answer depends on your basic understanding of the term “trickery”.
If “trickery” means “fictitious”, then my answer is that discounts can be very real, not trickery. Just that it might require flair with a calculator to verify the numbers and a sole focus on the final selling price to the exclusion of all other terms like MRP, List Price, Discount %, and so on.
If “trickery” means “leveraging consumer behavior to drive a consumer to a take a certain decision without them necessarily realizing it”, then discounts could be trickery.
If you think it’s equally okay for a supplier to say “Price is 200” or “Price is 50% off on 400”, then the discount is real.
If you ask, “why do they hike up the price to 400 just to claim a big discount percentage?”, then you might think the discount is trickery.
I’ve also noticed some people complaining about ecommerce companies raising prices before a sale. There’s an inherent confusion between MRP and List Price under this situation. MRP is a regulatory mandate. The figure is set by the brand and all retailers must display the same figure. MRP can change only if the brand changes it. If a retailer unilaterally changes the MRP from 200 to 400, and then claims to give 50% discount, that’s definitely trickery. On the other hand, there are many items sold by ecommerce companies on which there is no MRP (e.g. furniture) and each retailer is legally allowed to set whatever List Price they wish to and keep changing it as often as they wish to. As long as we’re talking List Prices – not MRP – I find no trickery when a company keeps moving its List Prices up and down frequently. But I know people who call this trickery.
*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.