Live Deals

Every link on this page points at a part of Amazon that is there all year, not at a sale banner that disappears when the festival ends. That is deliberate. We had a version of this page built around this year's Great Indian Festival URLs and threw it away, because in December those pages quietly go empty and nobody notices for a month.

When the sales actually fall

The Indian Amazon year has a shape, and knowing it is worth more than any single deal link. Roughly:

• Great Indian Festival — the big one, running from around late September through Diwali. This is when appliances, phones and anything with a bank-card offer attached are genuinely cheapest.
• Great Republic Day Sale — January. The second-best window, and usually the better one for kitchen and home.
• Prime Day — mid-year, members only, short.
• Summer and monsoon sales — smaller, and the ones where a “deal” is most likely to be an ordinary price with a bigger MRP printed next to it.

For what it is worth from a fruit business: the Alphonso season runs March to June and has nothing to do with any of these. Mangoes do not go on sale. The price moves with the day's harvest and the weather, which is why we quote ours on WhatsApp rather than printing a number.

How to tell a real discount from a printed one

The percentage next to a product is calculated against the MRP the seller declared, and the seller chooses that number. A thing that has never once sold at its MRP can show 70% off forever. Three checks that take about a minute:

Look at the rank, not the badge. A product that has climbed the sales rank sharply is usually one whose price genuinely dropped — other people have already done the arithmetic. That is what the Movers and Shakers page below actually shows.

Check the price history with one of the browser extensions or price-tracker sites that chart an ASIN over time. If the line is flat and the badge says 60% off, the badge is decoration.

Read the bank offer twice. Most of the real saving during a festival sale is in the card discount and the exchange value, not in the listed price, and both have caps that are easy to miss.

The pages worth a look

These are Amazon's permanent deal and ranking pages. During a festival the first one redirects to whatever sale is running, and the rest of the year it is the ordinary daily deals page — which is exactly why it is the one we link.

• Today's Deals — the main deals surface. Redirects to the live festival sale whenever one is on.
• Movers & Shakers — the biggest gainers in sales rank over the last twenty-four hours. The closest thing to an honest “trending” list, because it is behaviour rather than marketing.
• Best Sellers — updated hourly, across every department.
• Hot New Releases — useful mainly for appliances and kitchen gear, where last year's model drops in price when this one lands.
• Most Wished For — what people have saved rather than bought. Worth a look in the fortnight before Diwali if you are buying gifts.

Narrowed to the departments we know

The same ranking pages, scoped to the shelves this site actually writes about. These are more useful than the all-of-Amazon versions if you came here for food, kitchen or Konkan things.

• Best sellers in Grocery & Gourmet — where dry fruit, masala and tinned pulp sit. Compare against our pantry shelf.
• Best sellers in Home & Kitchen — see also the kitchen shelf and storage.
• Best sellers in Beauty — kokum butter and coconut oil live here. See Kokum & Coconut Care.
• Best sellers in Sports & Fitness — see the fitness shelf.
• Best sellers in Health & Personal Care — see Health & Wellness.

One thing we would say about sales

The cheapest version of almost everything is the one you did not buy. A festival sale is very good at making a thing you had not thought about until that morning feel urgent, and the discount is real while the need is not. The shelves on this site are short on purpose for the same reason.

Where a sale does earn its reputation is on the things you had already decided to buy and were waiting on — an appliance that has died, a phone three years old, the gift list you write every October anyway. For those, the Great Indian Festival and Republic Day windows are genuinely the two cheapest fortnights of the year.

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