Half the "70% OFF" banners you see on deal pages are theater. The trick is almost always the reference price: a seller sets an inflated list price that nobody ever actually paid, then "discounts" it back to the product's normal everyday price. The percentage looks heroic; the deal is nothing.
Before we post any deal, we look at where the price has actually been over the past few months. If a product "was $99.99" but has sold at $49.99 for most of the year, then a $44.99 sale price is roughly a 10% deal — not a 55% one. Free tools that track Amazon price history make this check take under a minute, and it is the single highest-value habit a deal hunter can build.
Real deals cluster around predictable events: seasonal clearance, a new model displacing last year's version, category-wide sale events, and brands defending market share. The discount is usually 20–40% against a price the product genuinely sold at, and it rarely lasts more than a few days. That is the window we try to catch — and why the freshest posts on our Products page matter more than the archive.
Our rule for everything we publish: if we would not buy it at that price ourselves, it does not go up.
