That "-72%" badge feels exciting. It's also, very often, fiction. Strikethrough "list prices" are set by sellers, and some of them are inflated precisely so the discount looks dramatic. After verifying hundreds of listings for our weekly edit, here's the framework we actually use — and you can too, in about a minute per product.
A genuine list price (Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price) is real, but many marketplace listings show a "was" price that the item rarely or never sold for. The bigger the claimed percentage, the more suspicious you should be.
Price trackers like camelcamelcamel (for Amazon) record every price change going back years. You instantly see whether today's price is actually low for that item — or just mid-range wearing a discount costume. This is exactly how we verify every price we publish: each listing on Consumer Luxe carries a "price checked" date from tracker data, and when the current price is higher than the historical list, we show only the current price and no fake savings.
A common pattern: a product sits at $89.99 for months, jumps to $129.99 for two weeks, then "drops" to $94.99 as a deal. The tracker chart makes this obvious — a steady line is trustworthy; a sudden spike right before a sale is a red flag.
Multi-packs are where value hides. A 3-pack of socks at $24.99 sounds mediocre until you see it's $8.33/pair against $12 for a single pair elsewhere. We flag genuine multi-pack value in our fashion picks for exactly this reason.
Dead variants — a size or colour that no longer has any seller — are everywhere. If a link shows "currently unavailable," the deal was never real for you. We mark such listings honestly with "Check Price on Amazon" instead of inventing a number.
Every card on Consumer Luxe shows the price with its check date, real product images from the listing, and no invented numbers. If a product's price can't be verified, you'll see "Check Price on Amazon" — that's honesty, not laziness. And every Amazon link is an affiliate link that supports the site at no extra cost to you (see our disclosure).
Browse this week's verified deals →