When the “deal” costs more than usual: real Amazon examples and how to spot them

The most misleading deals are not small discounts. They are “discounts” on a price that is higher than the product usually costs. Every week the Fake Deal Index finds them: products shown on Amazon with a deal badge and a struck-through price, while the price you would actually pay is above what the product has sold for over the previous three months.

Real examples from one week

These are from the week of October 19, 2026. Each was advertised as a deal. The “usual” price is what that product typically sold for over the previous 90 days.

None of these numbers is dramatic on its own. A dollar or two on a notebook is easy to shrug off. But that is precisely why the pattern works: the badge does the persuading, the price difference is too small to notice, and across a basket of purchases it adds up. On the mini PC it was about $117.

How a product ends up “on sale” above its usual price

From the outside we can only see prices, not decisions, but three patterns account for almost everything we find.

1. The reference price is a list price nobody pays

Many products carry a manufacturer’s list price that is well above where they actually sell. A discount measured against that list price can be shown on any day, at any price below it, including a price that is higher than usual. This is especially common with computers and office products, which were the two categories with the most fake discounts in our sample (see our category breakdown).

2. Raise, then “cut”

A price goes up for a few days, then comes back down to roughly where it was, and the brief higher price becomes the “was”. The discount is real relative to last week and meaningless relative to last month. Because our comparison uses the usual price over 90 days, a short spike does not move it much, which is exactly why these show up as busted.

3. The deal is stale

Some discounts are set up for a period and stay on the listing while the underlying price drifts upward. The badge still says 20% off something; the price underneath has moved on.

A two-minute check you can do yourself

1. Cover the badge. The percentage and the struck-through price are set by the seller. Decide based on the price alone.
2. Ask what it usually costs. Look at a price history for the product, ideally covering a year, so you can see the normal level and how often it dips. Our free checker shows this for any Amazon link: paste it into worthitforyou.
3. Compare today with the usual level, not the high point. If today’s price is about the same as, or above, what the product normally costs, it is not a deal, whatever the badge says. If it is near the lowest price of the year, it is a real one.
4. Check the exact item. Pack sizes, colours and configurations often have different price histories. A “deal” on a 3-pack is not comparable with the usual price of a single.
5. If it is not urgent, look at the calendar. In our data, ordinary weeks carried about three times as many fake discounts as the Prime Big Deal Days event itself (see what we measured during the event).

How these numbers are measured

Every week we take a fresh sample of advertised Amazon deals, about 1,500 to 1,750 of them, spread across 13 shopping categories so that no single category dominates. For each one we compare today’s price with the price that product has usually sold for over the previous 90 days, using our own price research. A deal counts as “not really a deal” (we call it busted) when today’s price is within 8% of that usual price or higher. In other words, the discount badge is there, but the price is not meaningfully lower than what the product normally costs.

That rule is deliberately generous to retailers. A product that is 9% below its usual price passes, even if its struck-through “was” price is wildly inflated. So the share you see is a floor, not a ceiling: the real number of misleading discounts is, if anything, higher. Each week’s report, its examples and a downloadable CSV are on the Fake Deal Index, and the full method is on our methodology page.

Why we publish this

We built worthitforyou because the deal badge is the least reliable number on a product page, and the price history is the most reliable one. We publish the index every week, with examples and the raw data, so anyone can see how often the badge misleads. If you have a link you are unsure about, check it for free before you buy, or try our fake-discount calculator with the numbers from the page.