How to spot a fake discount on Amazon
Four checks that take ten seconds each and will tell you whether that 80% off is real, using examples from our own catalogue.
Spotting bad deals · August 10, 2026 · 6 min read
A struck-through price is a claim, not a fact. Anyone selling on Amazon can type a number into the “list price” field, and plenty of them type whatever makes today’s price look like a rescue. Once you know what to look for, the fakes are obvious.
These are the four checks we apply to 28,145 products, reduced to things you can do yourself in a few seconds.
1. Ask whether anyone ever paid that
The single most useful question. A $9.99 mini fan marked “was $69.99”. A 128GB memory card “reduced” from $419.99. An ear-wax removal kit down from $59.99. All three are real listings we found, and in each case the original price is not a price the product ever sold at. It is a number chosen to make the discount badge bigger.
The test: would you have paid the original price for this, from this seller, with no discount? If the answer is obviously no, the discount is decoration.
2. Treat anything above 70% as suspect
Genuine deep discounts exist, but they are rare and they cluster around clearance, end-of-line stock and seasonal dumping. Across our whole catalogue the distribution of discounts falls away smoothly and then essentially stops: past 70% almost everything we looked at was either a broken feed row or an invented list price.
That is why nothing on this site shows more than 70% off. When a listing claims more, we keep the product and delete the claim rather than repeat it.
3. Watch for the variant trick
This one is subtle and it is not always deliberate. When a product has variants, a cheap one can inherit the expensive one’s list price. A $1 sizing kit attached to a $199 smart ring shows up as 99% off, and no human decided that; the data structure did it.
The tell is a discount that looks absurd on a cheap accessory, especially one sold alongside a much pricier main product. Check whether the thing you are buying is the thing the original price refers to.
4. Check the reviews, not the badge
A steep discount on a product nobody has bought is not a bargain, it is a warning. The products worth buying tend to have an unglamorous discount and a long review history.
We require a rating of 3 or better and at least 500 reviews before a product appears on a listing page here. It removes most of the catalogue. That is the intention.
What a real discount usually looks like
Modest. Across our catalogue the average genuine discount is around 20%, and only a small fraction of products are half price or better. If a site is showing you page after page of 70% and 80% badges, it is not finding better deals than everyone else. It is repeating numbers it has not checked.
If you want the full set of rules we apply, including the ones about content rather than price, they are written up in how we choose deals.