Trapping Fake Discounts as Drivers of Real Revenues and Their Impact on Consumer’s Behavior in India: A Case Study

Iqbal Thonse Hawaldar, Mithun S. Ullal, Felicia Ramona Birau and Cristi Spulbar ()
Additional contact information
Iqbal Thonse Hawaldar: College of Business Administration, Kingdom University, Riffa 40434, Bahrain
Mithun S. Ullal: Department of Commerce, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal 576104, India
Felicia Ramona Birau: Faculty of Social Science, University of Craiova, 200585 Craiova, Romania

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 17, 1-20

Abstract: This empirical study contributes towards identifying the effect of both fake and real discounts in the Indian marketing environment. A common but unsustainable practice in India is to increase the selling price and then offer a discount on the product. Increasing sales based on fake discount pricing strategy is a primary business development objective in India. The discounts, however, vary across store type and time and are based on product features. The selected databases were collected from the top five Indian e-commerce portals in terms of volume of sales, and from popular brick and motor outlets of tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India. The empirical results indicate that offers based on price in India had an impact of 2.8 times higher than the actual quality of the product. The outcomes suggest that marked price has a significant impact on consumer’s behavior. The results also indicate the existence of a strong correlation between trapping fake discounts and purchase by deceiving and persuading customers in India. Research is empirical in nature and respondents have been selected based on purposive sampling. The study is limited to tier 2 and 3 cities of India for 250 days, and the results are applicable to online and offline retail stores.

Keywords: advertising; prices; fake discounts; malls; e-commerce; consumer behavior; marginal cost; Indian middle-class; promotion technique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/17/4637/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/17/4637/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:17:p:4637-:d:261047

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().