How to Spot Fake Discounts When Online Shopping
That "70% OFF" tag might not be as good a deal as it looks. Here's how to tell a real discount from a marked-up price with a red sticker on it.
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Sep 7, 2026 · 3 min read · 8 views
Every online shopper has seen it: a product listed at a wild discount, a countdown timer ticking down, and a strikethrough "original price" that makes the deal feel urgent. The problem is that a lot of these discounts aren't real savings at all — they're inflated reference prices designed to make an ordinary price look like a bargain. Learning to spot the difference can save you real money over time.
The most common trick is the inflated "original price." A retailer lists an item at, say, $100, immediately marks it down to $40, and calls it a 60% discount — except the item was never actually sold at $100. It was priced at $40 from the start, or close to it. This is why the strikethrough price on its own means very little; what matters is what the item has actually sold for recently.
The easiest way to check this is with a price history tool. Browser extensions and standalone websites track how a product's price has moved over weeks or months, showing you a graph instead of a single claimed "before" price. If the price has been flat for the last month and only jumped right before the "sale" started, that's a strong sign the discount is manufactured rather than real.
Countdown timers deserve skepticism too. A genuine flash sale usually has a fixed, one-time end date tied to a specific event — a holiday, an anniversary sale, a clearance event. If you refresh the page a day later and the exact same countdown timer has simply reset to a new arbitrary number, it's not creating urgency around a real deadline, it's just a psychological nudge to make you buy faster.
Pay attention to "compare at" or "MSRP" prices as well, especially on generic or unbranded products. Many listings show a manufacturer's suggested price that no store has ever actually charged, just to make the current price look like a steal. This is especially common in categories where there's no dominant brand setting a real market price, like generic phone accessories or off-brand kitchen gadgets.
Coupon codes have their own version of this trick. Some codes are automatically applied at checkout regardless of whether you actually enter anything, meaning the "extra 15% off with code SAVE15" was already baked into the price you saw on the product page. You can usually catch this by removing the code at checkout and seeing if the price actually changes.
Finally, compare across at least two or three retailers before trusting any single "lowest price" or "best deal" badge. These badges are self-assigned by the store showing them to you, not verified by any outside source. A quick search across a couple of other stores selling the same item takes less than a minute and tells you far more than any badge or percentage-off sticker ever will.