MRP vs Discount Badge India 2026: What 1,100 Listings Actually Show

On 26 October 2026 we priced eleven shelves across six Indian retailers - grocery, sweets, sweatshirts, winter accessories, heaters, kettles, thermals, shawls, blankets, lip balm and body lotion - roughly 1,100 live listings, all read the same morning, all published separately and linked at the foot of this page.

Put together, they answer one question: what does the discount badge measure? The answer is consistent and unflattering. It measures the stated MRP - a number the seller chooses - and it tells you almost nothing about whether you are getting a good price.

This is the single most repeatable finding of the day. Rank any shelf by what it actually costs per unit, split it into quarters or thirds, and the badge runs backwards against the price.

If you want to see the mechanism rather than the pattern, group a shelf by the MRP each listing claims. Within one claimed figure, the percentage is pure arithmetic: price divided by claim, subtracted from one.

The last two rows are the ones worth remembering. Four Tata CLiQ shawls in four colours, all Rs. 599, all claiming Rs. 3,299, all badged 82% - the deepest badge on that shelf, and the colour is the only variable. And four Myntra beanies under one identical product title and one identical Rs. 2,199 claim, three selling at Rs. 999 and one at Rs. 2,199. The cheaper three show 55% off. The dearest shows nothing at all. A shopper filtering by discount sees the Rs. 999 tiles; a shopper who lands on the Rs. 2,199 one pays 2.2 times as much for a beanie of the same name.

The stated MRP is not a property of the product. We matched eight models across Amazon and Flipkart on the same morning; on several of them the two retailers printed different list prices for the identical item.

Four listings in one morning's reading carried stated MRPs that are arithmetically impossible as list prices. Each produced a badge in the mid-nineties. We excluded all four from every figure we published and named them, because a decimal-point error is not a discount.

One: divide by the unit. Rupees per 100g, per litre, per metre, per sheet, per gigabyte. Flipkart and Amazon both publish pack weights as structured data on grocery shelves - 283 of 287 grocery listings in our read stated one - and the rate it produces reorders the shelf completely. Two: divide the stated MRP by the price. On Myntra's accessory shelf the median claim is 2.0x the price and the extreme is 5.5x; anything above about 3x is mostly a claim about the past.

Three: check the rating count, and notice when there is none. Not one of 129 Flipkart sweatshirt listings published a star average; 57 of 96 Myntra accessory listings published none; 3 of 36 Tata CLiQ shawls did. Four: scroll for the same product. Nine Flipkart sweatshirts share one price, four Myntra beanies share one title, and one Durafit treadmill we read last week was listed twice Rs. 798 apart under a single rating pool.

The discount badge is a true statement about two numbers the seller published, and a near-useless guide to value. It is deepest on cheap goods, deepest on unbranded goods, deepest where there is no review history to check it against, and it changes between two shops selling the identical item. Nothing in that is improper - a retailer is entitled to state a list price and sell below it - but it does mean the percentage is the wrong thing to shop on.

Every figure on this page comes from listings read on 26 October 2026 and published in the eleven reads linked below, where the full methodology, the listing counts and the exclusions are set out in detail. Prices move daily; the arithmetic does not.