Amazon Prime Day Discounts Aren't Always As Big As They Seem (2024)

Amazon is excellent at capitalism. The ubiquitous online retailer uses every psychological trick imaginable (and some we probably can’t imagine) to maximize its profits, and one of the most powerful tools in the company’s arsenal is controlling the price of products during sales like its Prime Day promotions. The next one is expected in mid-July.

In a broad sense, the entire Prime Day operation is based on convincing consumers to buy things they don’t need, and one of the specific methods they use is manipulating prices over time to make you think you’re saving more money than you actually are. (Check out this deeper diver into Amazon’s tactics for more.)

A lot goes into how Amazon determines its prices, of course—inflation, supply and demand, and so on—but “making you think you’re getting an amazing deal” is an obvious motivation during promotions like Prime Day. To be fair, this is nothing new, and the tactic is used by most/all retail sellers, but, judging by their success, Amazon seems particularly good at it.

Consumers hoping to buy things that are worth the price they pay for them have a powerful, easy-to-use weapon that would have been nearly impossible to use before the internet: the ability to easily check the history of the price of a product.

How to check price history on Amazon

In the chart above (made with Keepa, a Chrome extension that compares Amazon prices over time) you can see the volatility of the price of an Amazon Fire TV Stick over the last year. While Amazon says the list price of the item is $39.99, as you can see, it's "on sale" as often as it's not, which stretches the common understanding of what a "list price" and a "sale" are.

Amazon offers the item for a lower price so often, you'd be foolish to buy it for the list price, but the Prime Day price of $24.99 isn't the best deal either. It's not lower than the price on most other "sale" days. The best time to buy a Fire Stick TV is around Christmas: You could have picked one up for $19.99 for almost the entire month of November.

The same broad principle applies to non-Amazon-made products, usually, although the prices of third-party products tend to be less volatile than Amazon products. . It was listed for the Prime Day price of $129.99 in 2023. That’s 30% off the stated "list price" of $185.39. A great deal, until you look a little closer.

If you had purchased this vac back in April, it would have cost you $153.39, so you’d really only save a little over 15% by buying had you bought it on Prime Day, not the advertised 30%. Anyone unlucky enough to have purchased this vacuum between May 1 and May 3, or May 10 through May 13, 2024 paid $289.99, a full $136.60 more than the lowest price.

How to check a product’s price history before you buy a product on Amazon

Because Prime Day deals aren’t posted until their specific time window, you can’t tell in advance how much of a discount you’ll get on a specific product. But if you’re buying something on Prime Day, you can check the price history instantly before you purchase something.

I’m sure Amazon would rather keep the history of its prices secret, but since they’re public, people have made sites, apps, and extensions that collect pricing history and allow you to comparison shop over time. I use the Keepa extension for Chrome because I like how it puts the price history of items right on every Amazon page you browse, but that’s not the only simple-to-use, free Amazon-specific price history tracking option. Others like Camelcamelcamel and Earny do basically the same thing with slightly different bells and whistles—I use CamelCamelCamel to get alerts when an item I’m tracking drops to a price I find acceptable. If you don’t already, you should use one of these tools before believing the hype of Amazon’s advertised discounts.

For a deeper dive into Amazon price checking, check out our list of the best price comparison tools.