Prime Day season means my inbox fills with DEAL alerts, and most of them are junk. A tech expert went through Amazon's historical price data to separate the real discounts from the ones that only look like discounts, and the whole exercise confirms something I've suspected for ages: the sticker price on sale day is often theater. The breakdown over at the Daily Mail compares current sale prices against what items actually sold for in recent months, which is the only comparison that matters.

Watch a few sale cycles and the pattern gets predictable. A hypothetical but very typical case might look like this: a gadget sits at one price for months, the listing price gets bumped up right before the sale, and then a big "percent off" Prime Day deal lands it right back where it started. The percentage is technically true against the inflated number. Your wallet notices nothing. I'm not pointing at a specific listing here, which is sort of the point; you have to check each one yourself.

Which is why price history trackers matter. Tools like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa log what Amazon items actually sold for going back a long way, and they're the closest thing we have to version control for pricing. You wouldn't merge a pull request without reading the diff, so don't buy a "deal" without reading the price history. Same instinct, different domain.

My own unsystematic observation is that the gadget categories I cover feel especially prone to this, maybe because tech has high sticker prices and constant refresh cycles and most shoppers can't recall what the item cost last month. I can't prove that ranking and neither can you, so treat it as vibes. What the price data does show, case by case, is whether the thing in your cart is actually at a low or not.

Some deals do check out. The expert's analysis exists precisely because a subset of the discounts are genuinely worth grabbing. My own buying filter, for what it's worth, is this: was it on your list before the sale, and does the price history show a real drop against recent selling prices, not just the inflated listing price? Two yeses and you're fine. Anything else is retail noise with a countdown timer bolted on.

Urgency is the mechanism, by the way. Lightning deals and "only 3 left" banners exist to short-circuit exactly the kind of checking I'm describing. And the data isn't secret; the trackers scrape it. The bet is simply that you won't look before the timer runs out.

So before the next deal alert pulls you in, spend sixty seconds on a price tracker. It's the least glamorous shopping advice possible, and it saves more money than any Prime Day membership perk ever will...