How to spot a fake Amazon discount.

01 / The problemWhy “was” prices mislead.

A discount is a comparison between two numbers. The retailer controls both. The lower one is what you pay; the higher one — the “was”, the RRP, the struck-through price — is whatever they choose to anchor you to. There are three common ways that anchor drifts away from reality:

• The invented RRP. A manufacturer's “recommended” price that the product has never actually sold at, on Amazon or anywhere. Common on unbranded electronics, accessories and home goods.
• The pre-sale bump. The listed price rises for a week or two before a promotion, so that the “sale” price is simply the old price with a badge on it. The rules only require the reference to be a price recently charged.
• Spike anchoring. A price that briefly jumped — one seller, one day, out-of-stock pricing — becomes the “was” for months afterwards. The 50% off is real against that one day and meaningless against the other 364.

02 / The methodThe three checks.

1. Check the history, not the “was”.

The only number that can't be chosen for you is what the product has actually sold for. Paste the link into a price-history check and look at the line. If today's price sits inside the band the product usually trades in, the badge is decoration.

2. A genuine low has usually been low before.

Real price floors recur — Prime Day, Black Friday, end-of-line clearance. If the chart shows the product touching today's price in previous sales, the price is real and you can decide calmly. If it has never been near it, that's either an exceptional deal or a data glitch; the seller and stock tell you which.

3. Compare to typical, not to peak.

Ask “how far below its usual price is this?” rather than “how far below its highest?”. A product usually at £12 and offered at £11 is 8% off, whatever the badge says about a £16 peak. We use the median price over the last year as “usual” and require a deal to be at least 15% under it — anything less is the product's normal price wearing a costume.

03 / In the wildReal examples from our desk this week.

Our scanner evaluates hundreds of Amazon UK “deals” a day and rejects most of them. Three from this week, anonymised but real:

• The £100 “deal” above its usual price. A product surfaced in Amazon's deal feed at £100.07. Its median price over the year is £61.53. The discount was real against a listed price that had been raised; against what the product normally costs, it was 63% more expensive. Rejected automatically.
• The clearance that sold out. A branded bomber jacket genuinely dropped to £29.72 — Amazon's own clearance on one odd size. It sold out within hours; the page then showed the next size at £144.20. A real deal for a few hours, a trap afterwards. Our checks now expire a deal the moment the product has no live offer, and hold any price under half of what the product has ever sold for until a human looks.
• The 21% that was 8%. A £10.99 Lightning Deal, badged 21% off a £13.99 listed price. The product's usual price is £11.99. Real saving: about a pound.

04 / AutomationHow we do it for every deal.

Every deal published here has passed the three checks by machine before you see it:

• The reference price is the product's own typical high(the 90th percentile of a year of recorded daily prices), or the listed price if that is lower. A claimed “was” can only ever shrink a discount.
• The current price must be at or under 85% of the median— meaningfully below usual, not just below a peak.
• We hold at least 14 days of history before making any discount claim, and re-check live prices against Amazon in rotation every thirty minutes — each deal at least every few hours.
• A product with no live offer is expired, not left showing its last price; a price under half of anything ever recorded is held for review rather than published.

The full algorithm, weights and changelog are public on the methodology page.

05 / QuestionsThe ones we get asked.

Is Amazon allowed to do this?

UK guidance says a reference price should be a genuine price the product was recently sold at. In practice that permits a “was” that the product held for a short time, which is a lower bar than “the price it usually sells for”. The badge can be compliant and still not tell you what you want to know — which is why the history matters more than the rules.

What about vouchers and coupons?

A clip-on voucher is applied at checkout, so price trackers can't see it in the listed price. When our scanner sees one we show it on the deal page separately, with an approximate checkout price, rather than folding it into the verified price — Amazon can withdraw a voucher without notice.

Do the same checks work for other retailers?

The principle does; the data is the hard part. Amazon is the only UK retailer with deep, public price-history coverage, which is why this site is Amazon-only for now.