How to Survive ‘Sale’ Season

By Veena Venugopal

It’s sale season and by the time I reached Gurgaon’s Ambience Mall on Sunday afternoon, most of the merchandise was already on the floor and the crowd, highly reminiscent of a Mumbai local station during peak hour, was clawing and elbowing its way through mountains of apparels and accessories.

Three hours later, nursing an extra large Costa coffee and surveying my bruises and scratches, I couldn’t stop feeling victorious about all the money I had saved. (Though I am an easily deluded consumer and end up buying things I wouldn’t have otherwise, just because they are on sale).

Despite the fact that I thought it was an afternoon well spent, I could not help shaking off the feeling that there has to be a better way to do this. After all, I always buy from specific shops and I shouldn’t have to walk from one end of the mall to the other (and Ambience has 1 kilometre of shopping on every floor, no kidding) just to see if Lacoste has a sale or not. How can I make this scientific and specific? I have, by now, moved almost all of my book buying online and am a much the happier for it. So I checked the sale sites – I had read about them somewhere and knew they existed.

Here then is my quick review of three sale and deal websites.

1.    www.salenoffers.com – Seems fantastic. It has the listings of all the stores that I shop from. You can setup a favourites list for yourself. So it becomes easy to cut through the garbage and get right down to what you want.
Unfortunately, it only has Mumbai listings. But if the stores you want to shop in are more national than small and independent, a quick extrapolation works.

2.    www.savingsmela.com – is definitely national. It has a state-wise, city wise listing covering everything from Aizwal in Mizoram to Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. But the actual list of sales and offers was pretty bad. In fact, it retuned none for most of the random options that I tried.
But the homepage has a tab that says ‘Today’s Deals’ and they are very decent. And it has a huge listing of florist deals.

3.    upto75.com – by far my favourite. Its sheer range of stuff you can get discounts on is amazing. Gym membership to haircuts. Ayurvedic therapy to building a website. The site is quite user-friendly – with specific tabs for metros and mini metros and another for multi city deals. It offers discounts on quite a few restaurants and also has easy links to facebook and twitter – just in case you want to get your friends onboard. If you register, they send you an e-mail a week, listing the sales and discounts in your city. If you don’t want to be bothered by that, just check their website.