How to spot a fake deal in 30 seconds
Merchants inflate MSRPs to fake discounts. Here are the exact signals we use to verify every deal on the platform.
Jordan Park
CompareMyCart editorial
Most 'deals' you see online aren't really deals — they're MSRP theatre. A product gets a fake inflated reference price, a red strikethrough, and a countdown timer. The actual selling price hasn't moved for months. The job of a price-comparison site isn't to amplify that theatre; it's to cut through it. After three years of running a tracker across the major marketplaces we've built a short checklist you can apply in under thirty seconds.
First — does the reference price exist in the wild? Open a second tab and search the product on two unrelated retailers. If the same item sells for roughly the 'discounted' number at full price elsewhere, the discount is theatre. We flag any listing where the claimed MSRP is more than 15% above the median price of the last six months. About one in four 'mega-deals' on marketplaces trigger that flag.
Second — has the price actually moved? A real price drop shows up as a visible step in the 30-day chart. A fake one shows up as a flat line with a made-up strikethrough on the right-hand side. If the listing doesn't expose a price history, infer it by sorting the seller's own review stream by date and eyeballing price mentions. If reviewers from three weeks ago paid the same as today, you're looking at the everyday price.
Third — who's the seller? A first-party listing (sold and shipped by the marketplace or the manufacturer) is held to tighter truth-in-advertising standards than a third-party reseller. Tap the seller name. If you see a store that was opened last month with fewer than fifty orders across all its SKUs, treat every claim with suspicion regardless of the star rating — new stores can buy stars for under a dollar each.
The pattern is consistent across every marketplace we track. Real discounts survive all three checks. Fake ones fail at least one, often all three. The thirty-second version: verify the reference price against a second retailer, look for a visible step in the trend, and confirm the seller has a track record. Anything that fails those is entertainment, not a deal.