The most common retail trick in 2026 isn't even subtle: show a "list price" that almost nobody has ever paid, then strike it through to make the discount look double what it actually is. Here's how to spot it before you click "buy."
Tell #1 — The "list price" is higher than the manufacturer's MSRP
Pull up the manufacturer's own website. If their list price is $249 and Amazon shows $349 crossed out next to a $199 sale, the discount is 20%, not 43%. This is the single most common deception and the easiest to catch.
Tell #2 — The same product has no history below the "sale" price
Browser extensions like Keepa (Amazon) and CamelCamelCamel (Amazon) show 90-day and 1-year price history. Retailers hate these tools for a reason. If the "sale" price matches the item's average price for the last 90 days, there is no deal.
Tell #3 — Count-down timers reset
A real flash sale ends. A manufactured one has a timer that quietly resets every 4 hours. Open an incognito window 5 hours after you first saw the deal — if the timer is still showing "2 hours left," the urgency is fake.
Tell #4 — The product is a new SKU number
One of the slickest tricks on Amazon is creating a new ASIN (product ID) for the same item, then setting the "list price" to whatever the brand wants. With no price history on the new SKU, the discount looks huge. If a product has fewer than 30 reviews but claims to be a $300 item on sale for $150, check whether there's an older version with thousands of reviews that's actually cheaper.
Tell #5 — Bundle upcharges
"Save 15% when you buy these 3 items together" is usually 15% off a bundle priced 20% above the sum of the individual items. Always price the individual components before you click the bundle.
What a real deal looks like
- A price that's below the 90-day minimum on Keepa or CamelCamelCamel.
- A brand that rarely discounts on this particular product.
- A sale tied to a specific, verifiable event (end of quarter, model refresh, holiday weekend).
- Availability holds at the discounted price for at least several hours rather than "last 2 left!"
How DealsHub catches this automatically
We rebuilt our scoring engine in April 2026 to do tells #1 and #2 for you on every listing. For each deal, we compute the median price observed over the last 90 days. If a retailer's "list price" is more than 15% above that median, we flag the anchor as inflated and recompute the discount against the median — not the marketing number.
You'll see this in two places. On the deal detail page, our "Is this a good deal?" verdict appends an honest note like "Heads up: based on the last 90 days of prices, the real discount is closer to 18%, not 60%." And in our 0–100 Deal Score, the inflated discount no longer counts — only the true discount does. A fake-anchor 70%-off listing scores like the genuine 18%-off it actually is.
It's the same logic Keepa users have been doing manually for years, baked into the score so you don't have to.
DealsHub verifies price history before we surface a deal. We filter out inflated-MSRP listings and flag any deal where the discount-versus-90-day-low is less than 10%. Browse our homepage for the current verified list.