🛍️ Fashion Retail Pricing & Discount Psychology Analysis (SQL Case Study)

📌 Project Overview

Most e-commerce fashion platforms don’t just sell clothes — they sell perceived savings.

This project analyses a large fashion product catalogue (~360K products) to understand:

Are customers buying fashion… or buying discounts?

Using MySQL, I investigated pricing behaviour, discount strategies, brand positioning, and marketplace psychology — the same type of analysis used by category managers, pricing teams, and retail analysts.

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🎯 Business Problem

Online marketplaces constantly display “50–80% OFF” banners.

But:

• Are those discounts real?
• Do premium brands actually sell at a premium value?
• Are customers being trained to wait for sales?
• Do brands compete on quality or on price manipulation?

This project answers those questions using data.

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🗂️ Dataset

Fashion E-commerce Product Catalogue

Total Records: ~360,000 products

Columns

• Brand — Product brand
• Description — Product details
• Id_Product — Unique identifier
• Category_by_gender — Men / Women / Unisex
• Original_Price — Marked retail price (MRP)
• Discount_Price — Selling price
• Colour — Product colour

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🧠 Key Analysis Areas

1. Marketplace Positioning

• Brand dominance in the catalogue
• Gender inventory focus
• Premium vs budget platform orientation

2. Pricing & Discount Psychology

• Do expensive items receive larger discounts?
• Brands dependent on discounts to sell
• Artificially inflated MRPs (fake discounts)
• Products never sold at the actual price

3. Merchandising Intelligence

• Most stocked colours (trend vs surplus)
• Overstocked categories
• Small brand vs big brand strategy

4. Revenue Strategy

• Are customers trained to wait for sales?
• Competitive price ranges
• Discount-driven vs value-driven marketplace

5. Advanced Retail Patterns

• Psychological pricing (₹499 / ₹999 effect)
• Algorithmic discounting
• Fake luxury brands

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🔍 Major Findings (What the Data Reveals)

The platform is discount-driven

A majority of products are sold below MRP, meaning customers rarely pay the listed price.

Some brands inflate prices to show bigger discounts

High MRP to selling price ratios indicate perception-based pricing rather than value-based pricing.

Premium does not mean premium

Several high-priced brands still require heavy discounting to sell, suggesting weak brand pull.

Customers are conditioned to wait for sales

Large catalogue share constantly discounted → sale becomes the normal price.

Psychological pricing is heavily used

Price points repeatedly cluster around ₹499 / ₹999 / ₹1499 — classic behavioural pricing strategy.

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🛠️ Tools Used

• MySQL — Data cleaning & analysis
• Aggregations, CASE statements, window logic
• Behavioural pricing analysis

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💡 Business Impact

This analysis simulates real work done by:

• Retail Pricing Analysts
• Category Managers
• Marketplace Strategy Teams
• E-commerce Growth Teams

Instead of describing what products exist, it explains:

Why are they priced that way?

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📊 Final Conclusion

The marketplace is not primarily selling fashion products.

It is selling the feeling of getting a deal.

Discounts are not promotional — they are structural.

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👤 Author

Abhishek Singh Aspiring Data Analyst | SQL | Business Analytics | Consumer Behaviour Analytics