How to Tell If an Amazon Deal Is Actually Good

I track thousands of Amazon deals every day. After watching over 100,000 price drops, coupons, and promotions cycle through, one thing has become obvious: most “deals” on Amazon are not deals at all. They are theater. Inflated list prices. Modest coupons dressed up as events. Urgency timers on products that have been sitting at the same price for six months straight.

This is everything I have learned about separating real discounts from noise. No tools to sell you. No affiliate pitches. Just the five things I check before I call something a deal worth sharing.

1. Check the price history, not the strikethrough price

Amazon's strikethrough price (the one with a line through it) is the “list price.” It is often meaningless. Sellers set their own list price, and Amazon does not verify it against what the product actually sells for. So a $40 product with a $100 list price is not 60% off. It is a $40 product with a made-up comparison number next to it.

The only way to know the real discount is to check what the product has actually sold for over time. Free tools like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa track Amazon price history for every product. Paste in the URL or ASIN and you will see every price change going back months or years. If the “sale price” is what the product has been selling for all year, it is not a sale. Period.

What I look for: a current price that is at or near the all-time low. That is a real deal. Everything else is marketing.

2. Calculate the dollar amount, not just the percentage

A 50% discount on a $6 phone case saves you $3. A 15% discount on a $200 kitchen appliance saves you $30. The percentage sounds better on the phone case, but the appliance deal puts ten times more money back in your pocket.

Deal sites (including Amazon's own promotions) lean on percentages because big numbers grab attention. Your bank account does not care about percentages. It cares about dollars. When you are looking at any deal, convert the discount to a dollar amount and ask yourself: is this saving meaningful for this type of product?

Here is roughly what good discounts look like by category:

• Electronics: $20+ off is solid. Margins are thin in electronics, so 15-20% off is often the best you will see outside of Prime Day.
• Beauty and personal care: high margins here. 30-50% off is normal. If you are seeing less than 25% off, that is just the regular price in a costume.
• Home and kitchen: $15-30 off is a decent deal. Anything over $40 off on a non-premium item is worth jumping on.
• Clothing: very seasonal. End-of-season clearance at 40-60% off is real. Mid-season “sales” of 10-20% off are not.

3. Look at the Best Sellers Rank, not the reviews alone

Amazon's Best Sellers Rank (BSR) tells you how much a product is actually selling compared to everything else in its category. A product with 10,000 five-star reviews sounds impressive. But if those reviews built up over five years and the BSR is sitting at 800,000, almost nobody is buying it right now.

Here is why this matters for deals. A low BSR (under 50,000 in a major category) plus a genuine price drop means real demand at a real discount. People are buying it, and it costs less than usual. On the other hand, a high BSR with a big discount usually means the product is not selling well and the seller is trying to move inventory. That might be fine, or it might mean there is a reason people are not buying it.

I use BSR as a quality filter at Krazy.Deals. A product that ranks in the top 10,000 of its category got there through sustained purchases, not ad spend. When that product drops in price, it is almost always worth paying attention to.

4. Learn how promo codes and coupons actually stack

Amazon has several discount types and they do not all work the same way:

• Sale price: the base discounted price. Always applied first.
• Digital coupon (the orange “clip coupon” checkbox on the product page): applied at checkout on top of the sale price.
• Promo code: entered at checkout. You get one per order. It stacks with digital coupons and sale prices.
• Subscribe and Save: 5-15% off for recurring delivery. Stacks with digital coupons but not always with promo codes.

The best deals happen when two or three of these combine. A product on sale with a clippable coupon and a promo code can easily hit 40-60% off the normal price. Amazon explicitly allows these combinations. Most shoppers just do not know to look for all three at the same time.

One thing to know: Amazon killed the ability to stack multiple promo codes on a single item back in 2025. You get one promo code per order now. If you see a site telling you to “stack coupon codes,” that information is out of date.

5. Time your purchase around the real sale events

Amazon runs thousands of promotions every day, but only a handful of events actually push prices well below their normal range:

• Prime Day in July: the deepest discounts of the year on Amazon devices, electronics, and select home goods. I regularly see 30-50% off on products that never go on sale any other time.
• Black Friday and Cyber Monday in November: the broadest selection of deals. Not always the absolute lowest prices, but the widest variety of products discounted at once.
• Prime Big Deal Days in October: Amazon's second Prime Day. Smaller scale, but the discounts are real, especially on items that did not sell through in July.
• Spring Sale in March: newer event. Discounts are real but modest compared to Prime Day.

Outside of those windows, most day-to-day Amazon “deals” are 5-15% off on products with inflated list prices. Not worth getting excited about. The exception is when individual sellers run their own promotions with promo codes or coupons. Those can happen any day and they are often the best deals on Amazon because most people never find them.

So what makes a deal actually good?

Three things. The price is at or near the historical low. The dollar savings are meaningful for that product category. And the product itself is something people are actually buying (you can tell from the BSR). If any one of those three is missing, I skip it.

Most shoppers never check any of this. They see a big red percentage, feel the urgency timer ticking, and buy on impulse. Amazon's interface is designed to produce exactly that reaction. Taking thirty seconds to verify a deal is real will save you from wasting money on fake discounts. I have seen it happen thousands of times.

That is why I built Krazy.Deals. Every deal on the site has been checked against price history and ranked by actual dollar savings, not percentage tricks. But whether you use our site or do it yourself, it comes down to the same thing: check the history, count the dollars, and ignore the noise.

Common questions

How do I know if an Amazon deal is real?

Check the price history. CamelCamelCamel is free and takes about ten seconds. If the “original price” got jacked up right before the sale started, the deal is fake. A real deal has a consistent previous price that is clearly higher than what you are paying now.

What percentage off counts as a good deal?

Depends on the category. Electronics have thin margins, so 20% off is genuinely good. Beauty and household products have fat margins, so 30-40% off is normal and anything above 50% is where it gets interesting. But honestly, the percentage by itself does not tell you much. A 60% discount that saves you $4 is not the same as a 20% discount that saves you $40.

Are Lightning Deals worth it?

Usually not. They create a lot of urgency but the actual discounts are often 10-15%, which is nothing special. The exceptions are Prime Day and Black Friday, when Amazon puts real money behind Lightning Deals and the discounts get much deeper. The rest of the year, I mostly ignore them.

Why do some Amazon discounts look obviously fake?

Because sellers can set their own “list price.” It is supposed to be the MSRP, but nobody checks. So a seller lists a product at $100, “marks it down” to $30, and suddenly it looks like a 70% discount. The product may have never sold for anywhere near $100. Check the price history and you will see the truth immediately.

Can I combine a promo code with a coupon?

Yes. One promo code per order, but that code stacks with the clippable digital coupon on the product page and with Subscribe and Save discounts. Layer all three together and you can hit 40-60% off without doing anything unusual. Amazon allows it. They just do not advertise that you can do it. One thing that no longer works: stacking multiple promo codes on a single item. Amazon shut that down in 2025.