Malaysia's 10.10 sale lands on 10 October, and the pitch is familiar: wait for the date and prices come down. Our own price tracking tells a more awkward story. Once a day we log the lowest price listed across Shopee and Lazada Malaysia for tens of thousands of products, and in the two weeks running up to this year's sale, more of the tech we track quietly got more expensive than cheaper.
Here is how we counted, so you can weigh it. We compared the snapshot from 25 September with the one from 9 October, 14 days apart, and kept the 14,299 products that held the same listed price for several days at each end of that window. That endpoint test is deliberate: it drops the overnight cases where a different seller or listing takes over and looks like a price change when it is not. Of those 14,299 products, 301 rose by 10% or more and 176 fell by 10% or more, a ratio of about 1.7 to one in favour of rises. The honest caveat comes first, though: most products, about 97%, did not move 10% in either direction at all. The movement is real, but it is concentrated.
Where the rises land is not even, and the sample sizes matter, so the chart below shows them. Printers were the clearest case: of 95 we track, 15% rose 10% or more against 5% that fell. Washing machines ran 15% up against 1% down from a pool of 58. Laptops (274 tracked), tablets (80) and air purifiers (91) each had 8% rising. Phones were calm by comparison: of 601 tracked, 4% rose and 1% fell. Cameras, from 183 tracked, had none rise 10% and only 1% fall. Routers were the most volatile category we track, meaning the largest combined share on the move, with 18% rising and 22% falling, but that is from a small pool of just 22 routers, so a handful of listings swing the share. If a new router is on your 10.10 list, our best Wi-Fi 6 router guide is the place to sanity-check what a fair price looks like.
Some of the rises are steep, and each one below held its higher price every day since it changed, on the lowest listing we track for that product. The Epson EcoTank L3150 printer went from RM579 to RM835. The HONOR Magic7 Pro moved from RM1,999 to RM2,779 on 27 September and has stayed there. A Lenovo Tab M8 tablet climbed from RM399 to RM578, and the TP-Link Archer AX23 router from RM229 to RM321. Whatever the reason behind each one, that is the starting number to compare any 10.10 price on these against, before the sale-day vouchers that can take it lower.
There are genuine cuts too, and they also settled rather than flickered. A HUGON 24-inch curved monitor dropped from RM499 to RM279. The Xiaomi Smart Band 8 fell from RM299 to RM189. The Canon Pixma MG2577S printer came down from RM338 to RM228. We wrote up seven more real price drops heading into 10.10 separately this week, so the bargains are there. Among the moves big enough to count, though, the rises outnumber them.
The practical point is simple. If a 10.10 price only brings a product back to what it cost two weeks ago, it is worth asking how much of a discount that really is, so check whether a sale number is a genuine cut or a return to one the item already held. One limit to keep in mind: the figures here are listed prices before the vouchers, coins and flash deals that appear on the day itself, so individual items can and will shift further on 10 October, and smaller moves below 10% sit outside this count entirely. What the baseline gives you is the number the sale has to beat. Our best laptops under RM2,000 guide and our electronics worth buying in a mega sale guide are built on the same habit: check the price against its own history, not against the banner.
The sale runs on 10 October. Before you tap buy, the price worth remembering is the one on the tag today, not the one in red tomorrow.
Image(s) courtesy of Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. Charts by ProductNation.
