A living calendar of every Amazon India sale in 2026: Mega Deals Days live 13-16 August, the Great Indian Festival expected to open late September-early October and run through Diwali, then Black Friday and year-end events. Includes buy-now-or-wait guidance per category, the bank-offer stack, and past-year timing. Re-verified weekly; expected windows become official dates the day Amazon announces.

Flipkart's credit-card EMI carries no processing fee — and its own worked example shows what it does cost. A Rs. 20,000 purchase is repaid as Rs. 20,401.33 over three months and Rs. 21,436.15 over twelve, the difference being bank interest at 12–13%. The 18 and 24-month plans are not universal either: SBI and HSBC do not offer them, and the seven banks that do set a Rs. 4,000 or Rs. 10,000 floor. Return the product and the interest already charged is not refunded. Here is every payment method Flipkart lists, the Rs. 50,000 Cash on Delivery ceiling and its cash-only rules, and the fine print worth reading before the monthly figure convinces you.

We read Croma's gaming aisle on 8 September 2026 — 54 listings across mice, keyboards, headsets, controllers and PlayStation games, priced from Rs. 104 to Rs. 14,995. Two pricing regimes share the shelf. The 17 Logitech G listings run a median 18% off at a median Rs. 7,999; the other 37 run a median 48% at Rs. 2,180, with badges up to 94%. Sony's DualSense controller is discounted 4%. And the evidence sits entirely on the shallow side: only seven listings on the whole shelf carry 50 or more ratings, while the 71%, 85% and 94% listings are rated by single digits or not at all. Here is the aisle row by row, the PlayStation discount ladder, and what the cheap corner actually gets you.

We read 100 toy listings across four amazon.in searches on 8 September 2026 — soft toys, kids toys, board games and remote control cars. The aisle is cheap: median Rs. 489, with 88 of the 100 under Rs. 1,000 and 55 under Rs. 500. The discount badge, though, has almost nothing to do with the deal. Toys from brands a parent could name — Funskool, Skillmatics, Monopoly — run a median 20% off; the other 78 listings run 61%, at roughly the same price. And the evidence sits at the bottom of the shelf: the most-reviewed toy here is a Rs. 169 unicorn with 36,800 ratings, while listings between Rs. 600 and Rs. 1,000 average a quarter of that feedback. Here is the whole shelf, row by row and band by band.

We read Tata CLiQ's lehenga shelf on 8 September 2026: 37 listings running from Rs. 1,449 to Rs. 61,650, a 42-times spread, at a median of Rs. 3,599. The discount badge turns out to be a house rule rather than a sale — Rhua's seven designer pieces are all exactly 10% off, Kaanchie Nanggia's ten are all exactly 40%, Divena's six are 55%, and Juniper's six run a median 61%. Nothing varies inside a brand. The other number worth knowing before you spend: only ten of the 37 listings carry a rating at all, and the largest rating count on the entire shelf is seven. Here is the shelf brand by brand and band by band, what sits under Rs. 3,000, and why the fabric word in the title is more informative than the stars.

Flipkart's Terms of Use name every extra line you can meet at checkout — a platform fee, GT Charges for delivery, and a convenience fee on flight bookings — and attach an amount to none of them. GT Charges are stated to vary by order value, distance and time of day. The Charges clause lets Flipkart introduce or amend fees at its discretion, with changes effective the moment they are posted. The flights convenience fee is non-refundable in every circumstance listed, including the airline's own failure. And a separate clause lets a seller cancel your order outright if the price was wrongly displayed. Here is what the document actually says about each charge, what happens when something goes wrong, and the escalation route Flipkart publishes.

We read four Myntra fitness listings on 8 September 2026 — yoga mats, gym accessories, fitness accessories and dumbbells — 161 products in all. The shelf is cheap: median Rs. 699, and 118 of the 161 under Rs. 1,000. It is also strange in one specific way. Six CULT yoga mats priced Rs. 464, Rs. 500, Rs. 599, Rs. 650, Rs. 650 and Rs. 999 all display the same 4.24 rating from the same 1,683 ratings, at discounts running from 0% to 76%. And the discount itself turns out to be a brand policy rather than a sale: ADRENEX runs 66% off, Decathlon 35%, NIVIA 2%, HackerX 0% on all eight of its dumbbell listings. Here is the whole shelf, row by row and brand by brand, with what Rs. 1,000 actually buys.

We read both fitness shelves on the same morning — 75 Amazon listings and 161 Myntra listings, on 8 September 2026 — and compared the three things both sites sell in volume. Yoga mats: a median of Rs. 324 on Amazon against Rs. 799 on Myntra. Dumbbells: Rs. 749 against Rs. 1,801. Resistance bands are a tie at about Rs. 350. The bigger gap is evidence: every Amazon listing carries a review count, at medians of 692 to 2,163, while Myntra's dumbbells row has a median of zero ratings. And neither discount badge survives inspection — Amazon shows MRPs a hundred times the price on three listings and below the price on ten; Myntra's percentages are flat brand policies from 0% to 66%. Here is the comparison, and where each shelf is still the right one.

We read Tata CLiQ's own search feed on 8 September 2026 across three queries — sandals, flats and slides for women — and took the 134 in-stock listings priced below their stated MRP. Twenty are seated here, from Rs. 356 to Rs. 1,374. The shelf's defining feature is how little evidence sits behind it: only 72 of the 134 listings carry a rating at all, and the counts are single digits. The cheapest pair displays 3.0 stars from one shopper; the best-supported product on the entire page has seven ratings. So we show a star pill only where five or more people have rated, and print the count every time. The discounts behave the same way: Red Tape runs exactly 75% off three separate pairs against stated MRPs up to Rs. 3,330, while Ginger by Lifestyle sells at 10% off. Fourteen listings sit at precisely Rs. 899.

We read 144 sunglasses listings from Amazon India's own search results on 8 September 2026 across three queries, and seated seventeen pairs from Rs. 220 to Rs. 1,499. The shelf runs backwards. The pair with the biggest crowd behind it — a Fastrack wayfarer with 24,663 ratings — carries a 6% discount and a stated MRP Rs. 50 above its price. The pairs with the spectacular badges — 77%, 81%, 83%, 85% off — are marketplace labels claiming MRPs of Rs. 1,999 to Rs. 2,999, backed by a couple of hundred ratings. Six listings in this read state an MRP five times or more above the selling price. Every card here prints the rating count beside the score, and the star pill only appears where at least 100 people have rated.

Flipkart's return policy is usually read as a table of days — 7 here, 10 there. The part that decides what actually happens is the brand. A phone from Apple, Google, Motorola, Infinix, Redmi, MI, Vivo, POCO, Realme or Samsung falls under “7 Days Service Center Replacement/Repair only” — you are sent to the brand's service centre. A phone from a brand off that list gets a straight 7-day marketplace replacement. Refund, meanwhile, is the exception: lifestyle, furniture, grocery and medicine have a money-back route, while electronics and appliances are replacement only. And at pick-up the MRP tag must still be attached — or the return is refused at your door.

The delivery date on a Flipkart listing reads like a promise from Flipkart. Its own shipping page says otherwise: the estimate belongs to the seller, and it moves with that seller's stock and distance from you — which is why two sellers of the same product quote different dates, and why some sellers decline your area “entirely at their discretion”. The stock tag matters just as much: In Stock is 2–6 business days where standard delivery runs, but 1 to 2 weeks by Registered Post where it does not. Add a Rs. 50,000 cash-only COD ceiling and no international delivery, and the pin code becomes the only field that answers any of it.

We read 68 television listings from Amazon India's own search results on 7 September 2026, across 24 to 55 inches. Divide each band's median by its diagonal and the shelf stops looking like a ladder: a 24-inch costs about Rs. 254 an inch, a 55-inch about Rs. 799 — 3.15 times as much. The steepest single step is 32 to 43 inches, about Rs. 15,000 at the median, more than a whole 32-inch television, because that is where 4K replaces HD. Discount depth runs the other way to evidence: the two 72% badges sit on listings with 131 and 196 ratings, while the best-rated set here — a Samsung 32-inch at 4.2 from 20,161 — is 11% off. Thirteen rating counts are shared across listings of different screen sizes.

We read both television shelves on the same afternoon, 7 September 2026 — 68 listings on Amazon, 86 on Croma — and neither shop wins. Croma's median is 45% above Amazon's at 32 inches, within 5% at 43, Rs. 2,000 below Amazon at 50, and 18% above at 55. The headline gap at the small end is not really about price: UNICRON, VW and Uniboom fill Amazon's 32-inch band and Croma stocks none of them. Compare the seven brands both actually sell and Samsung's 32-inch is Rs. 2,000 cheaper at Croma while Xiaomi's is identical to the rupee. At 55 inches, though, Croma is genuinely dearer — on LG, Xiaomi and Samsung alike.

We read Vijay Sales' own payment and refund terms on 7 September 2026. The published list of ways to pay is credit cards, debit cards and net banking — UPI appears nowhere in the document, though a terms page is not a live checkout. Cards must be Indian: orders on a card with an international billing address may be cancelled. Cash on delivery is capped at Rs. 50,000 and runs only in Mumbai, Pune, Gujarat and Delhi, collected between 11am and 6pm at your billing address. Three clauses decide what happens when things go wrong: a mispriced order can be cancelled rather than honoured, refunds are stated at 7 to 20 working days, and risk of loss passes to you when the goods reach the carrier — not your door.