Three kettles. Near-identical specs. Same price. Three different “discounts”.
All three sell for about Rs 1,400. One makes no claim. One says it was Rs 2,349. One says it was Rs 5,000 and that you're saving 72%. The kettle with the biggest claim is also, by far, the one with the most reviews (2,541).
Not just kettles
More sets of near-identical listings from the same search, captured . Pick one.
What the price tags show
Which ring light is the best deal?
Three listings for near-identical kits: a 26 cm ring light on a 7-foot tripod. Prices are hidden. Tap the one you'd buy.
Two kinds of “discount”
Every Daraz discount badge is simple arithmetic: 1 − (what you pay ÷ the struck-through price). The badge is always computed correctly. I checked all of them; none is off by more than half a percent.
The question is the struck-through price. Nothing on the page tells you where it came from, when anyone last paid it, or whether anyone ever did. A real discount is measured against what the product normally sells for.
That's the standard the EU writes into law: a discount must be measured from the lowest price in the 30 days before the sale.
Bigger claims. Same price.
Here's the test across all rated products. Within each category, I take the typical price of products that claim no real discount (under 10%) and call it 100. Then I look at products making bigger claims: where do they actually sell, and where does their tag say they "were"?
If the discounts were real price cuts, the blue dots would slide left as claims grow, and the orange dots would stay near 100. Watch what happens instead.
The same thing, in rupees
If a no-discount product in a category costs Rs 1,000, products claiming bigger discounts look like this:
For the statistically minded
What is a “40% off” badge worth?
Drag the slider to any claimed discount. Based on how products with that claim actually sell, compared with products in the same category that claim nothing.
A typical pattern, not a verdict on any single listing. Interpolated from the medians in the chart above.
The harder a price is to check, the bigger the claim
Average claimed discount by category. The deepest claims are on unbranded goods with no public list price. The shallowest are where buyers already know the price: big-brand appliances and phones, and things you buy every month.
Deepest claims
Average claimed discount, top 15
Most modest claims
Average claimed discount, bottom 10
Every category at a glance
Daraz’s own top-level categories. A discount counts as flawed when the listing claimed at least the column’s % off when I first saw it, I followed it for at least 6 days, and it never once sold at its “was” price. Small grey numbers are how many listings each share rests on (a dash means fewer than 20).
Swipe the table sideways to see every column →
Daraz’s data gives each category a number, not a name, so each one here is named after the searches its products came from. “Showing 10%+ off” is each product’s latest price tag.
Which price tags can you trust?
Products that showed 10%+ off when I first saw them and that I followed for 6+ days are real if they sold at their “was” price on some day, and flawed if they never did. Every other product goes by its latest price tag: a tag with no “was” price is simply the price, and many 10%+ badges were not seen on enough days to tell either way.
Swipe the table sideways to see every column →
Half off. Twice as often as anything else.
Claimed discounts pile up on round, persuasive numbers. "50% Off" is the most common badge on Daraz by a distance.
Rated products by claimed discount (5-point steps). Hover or tap a bar.
A badge helps a little. A bigger one doesn’t.
Daily sales counts let me watch units move instead of comparing lifetime totals. Within each search, I checked how often products made at least one sale over about days, by the discount they claimed.
Products under 1,000 sold only (Daraz rounds bigger counts, e.g. "1.2K"). This is correlation, not proof: a seller who puts work into a listing may also be the one who adds a badge. The one-day snapshot, which compares lifetime totals, found bigger claims going with more sales in only of categories.
The real price moves. The “was” price is painted on.
I captured the same products every day. If the struck-through price recorded a real past price, it would move when prices move. Most of the time, it doesn't.
A discount measured from a number that never changes is a label, not a history.
The “was” price was charged for about 1 product in
I followed product listings that claimed at least 10% off, each for 6 to days. If the struck-through price were a real, recent price, some of them would sell at it now and then.
The EU test, run early
EU law measures a discount from the lowest price of the previous 30 days. I applied the same rule to the days I have.
Prices are creeping up. The badges don’t say so.
The same product listings, compared with what each cost on . The share priced above its first-day price has climbed on almost every day I captured. The share priced below it has bounced between % and %.
I found no announced Daraz campaign in this window: on 29 Oct the homepage showed only its usual flash sale, and the 11.11 page was still empty. Ordinary price changes could explain part of the rise. The 11.11 prices will settle it.
In China or the EU, almost none of these badges would be legal as shown
China and the EU now say exactly what a “was” price must be: the lowest price the product actually sold for in a recent window. Pakistan bans misleading prices in general, but has no rule on what a “was” price means. I ran the same Daraz badges through each rule.
- The “was” price can’t be higher than the lowest price of the previous 7 days.
- Raising a price just before a discount is banned outright.
- Since April 2026, platforms and their sellers must show the discount base truthfully, and platforms must run a price-complaint channel and stop violations.
- Any price cut must show the lowest price of the previous 30 days as the “was” price.
- The % off must be calculated from that price (EU Court of Justice, Aldi Süd, 2024).
- A March 2026 EU sweep of 314 online traders found 30% showing discounts incorrectly.
- Bans false or misleading price information in general, with fines up to Rs 75 million or 10% of turnover.
- Nothing defines a “was” price, or how recent it must be.
- The Competition Commission’s 2023 guidelines say platforms and sellers share equal responsibility. I found no action naming Daraz.
How far back other countries look
In December 2023 Pakistan’s Competition Commission found gaps between advertised and actual discounts at about 96% of surveyed fashion outlets (physical stores). Its 2023 guidelines list raising a price to fund a “buy one, get one free” offer as deceptive, the nearest local equivalent of China’s ban.
Was the “original” price ever real?
The Wayback Machine has archived Daraz product pages since 2019. of today's products have archived prices. Each chart shows what a product sold for in the past (grey), what it sells for today (blue), and the struck-through price on today's tag (orange line).
Across the archive
Products archived in the past 12 months, same variant as today. Claimed discount vs the discount against the lowest archived price.
The archive mostly saved big branded appliances, where claims are honest-ish. For the few No Brand products it saved, the struck-through price was a real price at some point last year. That points to stale anchors: an old price kept on display long after it stopped being the price. The EU's 30-day rule exists to catch exactly that.
Your brain grades prices on a curve
People judge a price by comparing it to a reference. A struck-through price hands you the reference. It works even when you half-suspect it's inflated.
↓ search
Advertised "was" prices raise how good a deal feels and make people stop comparing.
Compeau & Grewal, meta-analysis, J. Public Policy & Marketing, 1998In outlet-store data, raising the list price by $1 lifted sales about as much as cutting the actual price by 77 cents. Fake list prices worked best.
Ngwe, "Fake Discounts Drive Real Revenues in Retail", HBS working paperTell shoppers the true normal price and the extra sales from a fake discount disappear.
Staelin, Urbany & Ngwe, Journal of Marketing, 2023The bill comes due in trust
A fake discount borrows against trust. Buyers notice eventually: they see the same item at the "sale" price every week, or find it cheaper elsewhere. The evidence on what happens next points one way.
Distrust in Daraz reviews
Share of 500 Daraz reviews (2022–24) using distrust language. Latif et al., Bulletin of Management Review, 2026 (small journal; treat as indicative).
Black Friday “deals” in the UK
Share of deals that were the same price or cheaper at other times. Which?, consumer group studies.
- Burned customers buy less, for a long time. In a 28-month field experiment with 50,000+ customers, people who saw a lower price after buying cut future purchases, and the best customers cut the most. (Anderson & Simester, QJE 2010)
- Regulators catch up. The EU, UK and China have all moved from "don't lie" to specific rules on what a "was" price must mean. See below.
- Discounts stop meaning anything. When 79% of products claim a discount and a third claim half off, the badge carries no information. Honest sellers can't signal a real deal.
The real test is 11.11
A single day compares different products; the daily series compares each product with itself. From now until mid-December, the same searches are captured every day, with extra captures on the eve and morning of each sale:
- The 30-day rule. Is the 11.11 price really below the lowest price of the previous 30 days? (The early version above: almost never, outside a sale.)
- Anchor age. When was the struck-through price last the actual price, if ever?
- The pre-sale hike. Do the prices that crept up in late October get "cut" back on the day, and sold as a discount?