How Indians save money

What are the products that Indians like to save money on? Why and how often do they reach for discounts? The Picodi.com analysis team conducted a survey among Indian consumers to check what is their attitude towards sales and to find out the most popular ways to save money.

What we save money on

The pandemic forced many Indians to save money. More than half of the surveyed people (75%) admitted that over the past year, they bought more products on sale than before.

The product categories most frequently bought on sale include food, clothes and footwear, as well as home appliances. Products bought on sale the least are cars (car parts), jewellery, and pet supplies.

There are products which Indians are willing to wait for instead of buying them at the initial price. These include home appliances (87%), travel & leisure (84%), clothes (83%), sporting goods (81%) or jewellery (79%).

On the other hand, there are some categories of products which Indians don’t want or can’t wait for — and they buy them regardless of whether there is a sale or not. These include medicine (55% don’t want to wait for discounts), food (44%), pet supplies (42%), underwear (38%), or child-care articles (35%).

Why do Indian consumers buy on sales? The most common answer among female and male respondents was that they can save a lot of money thanks to discounts (58% and 59% respectively). The second most popular answer among both men and women (44% and 43% respectively) was that discounts allow them to become familiar with a brand. More than one-third of the men and women surveyed (34% and 37% respectively) believe that the initial prices are too high, so they look for discounted products.

Not everyone likes discounts. 31% of women and 37% of men don’t buy on sales because they think high quality products are worth their standard price. 17% of women and 21% of men ignore sales because they simply don’t worry about the prices. 8% of women believe that discounted products are poor quality or outdated, although as many as 13% of men share this opinion.

Sometimes Indians buy products on sale and never use them. The top 5 categories of products which are thrown away or left unused on shelves are:

1. Food
2. Clothes
3. Underwear
4. Cosmetics and perfumes
5. Home appliances

Indian ways to save money

There are many ways to save money, that is why Picodi.com asked Indians which methods for finding and using discounts are their favourite.

Among the most popular ones, cashback services placed first. 16% of Indians know this method and use it regularly, and as many as 32% use it from time to time. 20% participants admitted that they know what cashback services are, but they don’t use them, and only 32% don’t know what it is at all.

Price comparison services are used regularly by 13% of those surveyed. 29% use them sometimes, 18% know and don’t use them. 40% claimed they don’t know about the existence of price comparison services.

In the third place were shelves with products reaching their expiry date — 14% use them regularly. 27% use them from time to time, 19% know and don’t use them, while 40% don’t know them at all.

Browser plugins with coupons are not very common (60% of the surveyed consumers don’t know what it is), similar to apps for ordering unsold food surplus (60%), store flyers (54%), and coupon services (42%).

What Indians think about ads

What do Indians think about advertisements, and do they feel overwhelmed by them? It turns out that more than half (58%) of the respondents think that the number of ads is acceptable. On the contrary, as many as 20% admit that there are too many advertisements. 22% of surveyed Indian consumers don’t feel like there are too many ads.

It turns out that the most popular ad that people receive is email — on average, as many as 33 a week. In second place are text messages (27 times a week). Mailbox leaflets complete the podium — consumers see them around 24 times a week.

Push notifications in browsers (18 per week) and in mobile apps (15 per week) are not as frequent.

If you want to be like other Indians and save on home appliances, consider checking out our cashback service. With Picodi you can combine discount codes and cashback to save money in stores such as Croma, Moglix and Snapdeal.

Methodology

The statistics are from an online survey conducted in July 2021.

Public Use

Would you like to share information about sales and discounts in India? You are welcome to use all the data and infographics presented in this report for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided that you indicate the author of the research (Picodi.com) with a link to this subpage.