First Impression
Inflated MRP and discounts so high they kill trust
A struck-through MRP and a permanent 70-plus percent off badge read as fake to Indian buyers who have seen the trick a thousand times.
What this leak is doing on your store
Indian shoppers have been conditioned by years of marketplace inflation to read a giant discount as a giant lie. When you show a 2,999 MRP slashed to 799 on every product, every day, you are not creating urgency, you are signalling that the 2,999 was never real and that your 799 is probably still padded. That suspicion does not stay contained to price; it spreads to the product quality, the reviews, and whether the parcel will even match the photos. A brand that wants premium positioning cannot also wear a permanent fire-sale badge, because the two messages cancel out and the buyer trusts neither. The leak costs you the margin you think the discount is protecting and the trust that actually drives the purchase.
A Delhi apparel label priced kurtas at a 2,499 MRP struck through to 649 on every single SKU, with the discount banner hard-coded into the theme so it never changed. Returning visitors saw the identical sale week after week, and the brand could not understand why its repeat rate was so low.
How an Indian buyer reads this
An experienced Indian buyer sees a 75 percent off sticker and immediately recalibrates the real value downward, assuming the inflated MRP is theatre they have watched on every marketplace listing. Instead of feeling lucky they feel handled, and the question shifts from should I buy to is this cheap stuff dressed up. For a genuinely premium brand this is fatal, because the same buyer who would pay full price for something that looks honest will refuse a discounted price that looks like a con.
Severity and where we usually see it
- Typical severity: 4 to 8 out of 10 — high when present.
- Where we see it: Shopify, WooCommerce.
- India-specific: Yes — this leak hits Indian D2C stores harder than Western tools assume.
How MakeMeConvert detects it
We read the product and homepage pricing copy and flag struck-through MRP patterns paired with very high percentage-off claims, especially when the same heavy discount appears site-wide rather than on a clearly bounded sale. We weigh this against the detected vertical, since a premium-positioned brand carrying a permanent deep discount is a sharper trust contradiction than a value brand.
What fixing it looks like
The direction is to bring claimed value and real price into a believable relationship, so the offer reads as honest rather than inflated. The exact pricing architecture, what to anchor against, and how to create urgency without the fake-MRP tell is the work we do in the paid audit.
Want to put a number on it? Break-even ROAS calculator shows you the real cost on your own unit economics. Or just score your store free to see if this leak is open.