Prime Big Deal Days: how to tell a real discount from a fake one
October 3, 2026 · Amazon's October sale runs October 6 and 7. Walmart, Target and Best Buy run their own events the same week. Everything below applies to all of them.
Every deal event produces the same screenshot: a big red percentage, a struck-through price, and a countdown. Some of those are real. Most are not, and the ones that are not follow three patterns you can learn in five minutes. This is the page I wish existed before I started building a filter for junk listings and found out how the struck-through number is actually produced.
What the struck-through price actually is
Amazon shows two different kinds of reference price, and it does not make the difference obvious.
$24.99-69%
"List Price" is a number the seller typed into a form. Amazon's own seller guidance describes it as the manufacturer's suggested retail price, and says Amazon "validates" it against sales in its store and at other retailers. For a product from a brand you have heard of, that validation means something. For a product whose brand is seven random capital letters and whose manufacturer is the seller, the "manufacturer's suggested price" is whatever the seller suggests, and there is nothing to validate it against. That is the whole trick, and it is why junk listings so often show 60 to 90 percent off, permanently.
$24.99-21%
"Typical price" is better. Amazon computes it from the median price customers actually paid over the last 90 days, excluding short promotions. Since May 2026, if an item was discounted for more than half of those 90 days, the promotional prices count too, which pulls the "typical" number down toward what people really pay. A struck-through typical price is a weak signal that the discount is real. A struck-through list price on a no-name product is close to no signal at all.
The word matters more than the number. Read it before you read the percentage.
The three tricks
1. The fictional list price
The one above. A $25 phone mount gets a $79.99 "list price" at the moment the listing is created, and it has been "69% off" every day since. It is not a sale; it is the price. You can usually confirm it in ten seconds by clicking the brand name: if the same "brand" sells a dog leash, a meat thermometer and a phone case, nobody at a head office set an MSRP. This is the pattern ClearCart's free filter catches on the search page, and it collapses the listing into a bar that says Hidden: inflated list price, with one click to bring it back.
2. The run-up
Raise the price three weeks before the event, then "cut" it back to normal on the day. The deal page is technically truthful, because the item really did cost more last week. The only defence is knowing what it cost a month ago, which is why price history matters more than any percentage. A proposed class action filed after July's Prime Day accuses Amazon of exactly this pattern with its own listings (ConsumerAffairs), so this is not only a third-party-seller problem.
3. The old low, re-sold as new
The biggest category in the Visualping data: 44.7% of "deals" simply returned to a price the item had already been at. Not a trick exactly, but not a reason to buy today either. If a thing has been $24.99 four times this year, it will be $24.99 again in November.
The 60-second check
- Read the word next to the strikethrough. "Typical price" means something. "List Price" on a brand you do not recognise means nothing.
- Click the brand. A real company has a product line that makes sense. A one-page storefront of unrelated items is a warehouse with a trademark, and its prices are fiction.
- Look at the unit price, the small grey number per ounce, per count or per foot. Deal-day bundles love to look cheaper while costing more per unit.
- Check the price somewhere else. The same product is often cheaper, today, at a retailer that is not running an event. ClearCart adds a "Compare price" button to every product page that opens a Google Shopping search for that exact item; it does nothing until you click it.
- Check what it cost before. Free trackers like camelcamelcamel and Keepa keep public histories for most big-brand items. For the long tail they do not cover, ClearCart keeps a price history built only from pages you have visited, stored only in your browser. Which leads to the one thing worth doing this weekend:
Do this before Monday
Open the product pages of the things you are actually planning to buy, today and tomorrow. That is it. ClearCart records the price each time you look, on your own device, and on Tuesday the product page will say "Lowest you've seen: $31.49 on Oct 3" right next to whatever the deal badge claims. Nobody can backdate that, and you did not need a tracker to remember to track it.
If you install this weekend, you also get all of the Pro controls free for your first 14 days, no email and no card, which covers the whole event: inflated-list-price warnings on product pages, the price history above, and the switch that hides every sponsored placement so the deal page is only the deals.
Install ClearCart free Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Runs in your browser; nothing is collected.
Two honest caveats
Real deals exist. Amazon's own devices, big-brand TVs and headphones, and anything with a typical price struck through are often genuinely at a yearly low on these two days. The point of this page is not that you should not buy anything. It is that the percentage is the least reliable number on the screen, and the word next to it, the brand behind it and the price last month are the reliable ones.
And nothing here is Amazon-specific. Walmart's marketplace now hosts the same sellers with the same list prices, which is why the filter runs there too.