How to spot a fake deal online
The discount is the easiest number on a listing to manufacture. Five checks take about two minutes each and between them catch almost everything that is pretending to be a bargain.
A discount is arithmetic between two numbers, and only one of them has to be real. The lower figure is what the seller will take today, and it is usually honest because they have to honour it. The higher figure it is measured against is often whatever makes the gap look largest: a maximum printed on a box, an old listing, or a figure nobody has charged in a year. That is why a listing can show an enormous percentage and still be the most expensive place to buy the thing. None of the checks below requires any tools, and each of them takes a couple of minutes.
Find out what the higher number is measured against
Every struck-through figure is measured against something, and the listing rarely says what. It may be the maximum printed on the box, which is a legal ceiling rather than a selling price and is often set well above anything the market charges. It may be the price on the same listing last week. It may be the price at a different seller. These produce wildly different percentages for the same actual offer, which is the point. The useful question is never how large the discount is but what the thing costs today at two or three other places.
- The maximum on the box is a ceiling, not a price. A discount against it means very little.
- Compare what you would pay today somewhere else, not what the listing says you are saving.
Read the seller, not the site
On a marketplace, the site is a venue and the listing belongs to a seller. Two listings for the same item on the same site can be two different businesses with different stock, different warranty handling and different returns. A good price from a seller with a short history and no rating is a different proposition from the same price from an established one. The seller name is usually in small type near the price, and reading it tells you more than the discount does.
Reviews arrive slowly, so a burst of them is a signal
Genuine ratings accumulate over months, from people who bought at different times and had different experiences. A listing with hundreds of ratings almost all posted within a few days is describing something other than a year of ownership. The same applies to reviews that all praise the same feature in the same words, and to a rating that is high while the written reviews underneath it are lukewarm. None of these proves anything on its own; together they are a pattern worth respecting.
- Sort the reviews by most recent rather than most helpful, which is usually curated.
- Read the one-star reviews first: they are where returns, warranty and fakes get mentioned.
Check the model number, not the model name
Manufacturers sell several versions of a model under one name, and a listing that gives the name but not the model number is leaving the most important line out. Two listings for what looks like one product can differ in memory, panel, region or bundled accessories, and the cheaper one is often the one missing something. Before comparing anything, find the model number on both listings. If one of them does not publish it, that is your answer about which to compare against.
An offer with conditions is not the price
Much of what looks like a discount is an offer with a condition attached: a particular bank card, a minimum spend, an exchange of an old device in good condition, or a coupon that has to be applied. Each is real and each may not apply to you. The figure to compare across sites is what you would actually pay at checkout, after shipping and any platform fee, with the offers you can personally use. A headline that assumes a card you do not hold is not a price, it is an advertisement.
What to try, in order
- Open the same item at two other places and compare what you would pay today, ignoring both discounts.
- Find the seller name on the listing and read its rating and history.
- Sort reviews by most recent, then read the one-star ones before anything else.
- Locate the model number on every listing you are comparing, and discard the ones that do not publish it.
- Work out the delivered total with only the offers you can personally use.
- If the listing is far below everything else, check the warranty wording and who honours it before anything else.
What to take from this
A discount is the easiest thing on a page to manufacture, because only the lower number has to be true. Ignore the percentage entirely and ask four questions instead: what does this cost elsewhere today, who is the seller, does the model number match, and what would I actually pay at checkout. Those four take a few minutes and between them catch almost everything pretending to be a bargain.
Common questions
Is a very large discount always suspicious?
Not always. Genuine clearances happen when a model is replaced, a seller is leaving a category, or stock is close to an expiry of some kind. What makes a large discount suspicious is when the seller is unknown, the model number is missing, or the warranty is described vaguely. The size of the number is not the signal; what surrounds it is.
Are sale events a good time to buy?
They are a good time to buy things you had already decided on. The risk during a sale is not fake pricing so much as the pressure to decide quickly, which is exactly when people skip the seller and the model number. Decide what you want first, then look at what the event does to the price.
What does it mean when a price keeps changing through the day?
Usually that listings are repriced automatically as stock and competing sellers move. It is not aimed at you. It does mean a figure you saw in the morning was true then for that seller, and it is worth re-checking at the moment you are ready to buy rather than trusting a screenshot.
