The anatomy of a fake discount
We pulled 1.2 million 'sale' listings and checked them against a year of real pricing. Fewer than half were genuine reductions.
Sofia LindqvistHead of Data Science
A strike-through price is a claim, not a fact. It asserts that the product recently sold at a higher number, and in most jurisdictions that claim is loosely regulated and rarely audited. So we audited it.
Across 1.2 million listings that displayed a comparison price during the first half of 2026, only 47% had genuinely sold at or above that comparison price at any point in the preceding six months. The remaining 53% were, at best, optimistic.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a playbook. A listing sits at its true market price for months. Nine to fourteen days before a major sale event, the price quietly rises 20–35%. The event begins, the price returns to roughly where it always was, and the difference is presented as a saving.
This is exactly the class of problem a price history solves. When you can see the twelve-month series, the pre-sale bump is unmissable — it looks like a single square wave in an otherwise flat line. Our detector simply formalises what your eye already does with the chart in front of it.
What surprised us more was category variation. Small appliances and consumer audio were the worst offenders, with roughly two thirds of comparison prices unsupported. Cameras and lenses were the cleanest, likely because enthusiast communities track street prices closely enough to make the tactic embarrassing.
