Amazon's Great Indian Festival opens on 8 October. Flipkart's Big Billion Days opens on 9 October, with early access for Plus and Black members a day earlier.
On 17 September we froze a record of every price we had collected in the previous month, and we haven't touched it since. It sits on the pre-sale prices page. The point of freezing it was to be able to answer one question when the sale arrives: what did this cost before?
Two weeks on, it's worth asking early.
What has moved
The frozen record holds 464 price series. A series is one product on one platform, with its own history. We compare like with like, so Amazon today against Amazon then, never one shop's sale against another shop's normal price.
261 of them have at least seven readings before the freeze and a live price in the last three days. Those are the ones worth comparing.
Set against its own median for 18 August to 17 September, 42 of them are dearer today by 3% or more. 72 are cheaper by at least that much. The remaining 147 sit within 3% of where they were.
So most things haven't moved, and among those that have, more went down than up. That is the headline, and it is the opposite of what people expect to hear in the week before a sale.
The stricter test
A median can mislead when a price bounces around. So here is a harder question, which a price cannot pass by accident: is it now dearer than every single reading we took before the freeze?
For 26 products, yes. For 44, the reverse, cheaper than anything we recorded. Among the 26, the typical price sits 13% above the old high.
The pattern by platform is the interesting part, and it is about activity rather than about who is cheaper.
Flipkart listings showed the most movement, in both directions at once. Of 112 products, 25 are above their old high and 28 are below their old low, so roughly a quarter went up and a quarter went down. On Amazon, 1 of 98 products is above its old high and 16 are below their old low, a slow drift downward. On Nykaa, none of the 51 products left their old range in two weeks.
Frequent price changes and steady prices are both normal. Where nothing moved, nothing moved. Where prices change often, they will show up in a test like this whichever way they go.
Above the earlier range
These are the products now priced above anything we recorded in the month to 17 September. The ones that went the other way, below anything we recorded, are on the pre-sale prices page marked new low, with today's figures.
| Product | Highest we recorded to 17 Sep | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Vega VHDH20 dryer | ₹775 | ₹994 |
| Philips BHS393 straightener | ₹2,000 | ₹2,483 |
| Havells HD4081 dryer | ₹1,505 | ₹1,815 |
| Philips MG7931 trimmer | ₹4,626 | ₹5,468 |
| Ikonic CT22 curler | ₹3,365 | ₹3,773 |
| Vega VHCH05 curler | ₹849 | ₹965 |
The last one shows the movement clearly. Through August and early September it sat between ₹799 and ₹849 on seventeen separate readings. Since the freeze it has gone ₹890, then ₹949, then ₹965.
Why it matters next week
If a product rises now and is then discounted during the sale, it can land back at roughly its August price while carrying a much larger badge. The badge will be arithmetically correct and the real saving smaller than it looks. The same check works the other way: a product that fell before the sale may already have most of its discount.
That is the whole reason the 17 September record exists and the whole reason it is frozen rather than recalculated. When the sale opens, the comparison you want isn't sale price against declared MRP. It's sale price against what that listing charged in August.
What this does not show
A rise has many ordinary causes. Stock running out, a cheaper seller leaving a listing, an ordinary offer ending, and a genuine cost increase all produce this shape. We can see that the number moved. We cannot see why, and we're not going to guess.
Seven readings is a short history. Our price data starts on 10 August, so nothing here knows what these products cost in June.
It is not the whole catalogue. Products are refreshed in rotation, so this is the 261 series that had enough readings on both sides of the freeze.
Cheaper than the old low is not automatically a bargain either. Some of those 44 are sitting in the Flipkart early deals that started on 24 September, and those will move again.
The next record
We will freeze a second one on 6 October, the last full day before Prime early access opens on 7 October and the main sale on 8 October. That pair answers a question a single record cannot: did this price go up in the weeks right before the sale, and then come back down inside it?
Until then, the live figures for every product are on the pre-sale prices page, and the method behind the badge is in is the discount real.
Prices compared on 30 September 2026 against readings taken from 18 August to 17 September 2026, across Amazon, Flipkart and Nykaa.