Prime Big Deal Days discounts aren't always what they claim to be.
Amazon's October sale runs October 6 and 7, and some listings inflate the original price to make the markdown look bigger. One power station, the Anker Solix S2000, shows a 43 percent discount off a $1,199 list price on Amazon - but Anker's own site lists the true MSRP for the same unit at $999.99, with an identical sale price on both pages. Other deals come from resellers rather than Amazon itself: a discounted Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra turned out to be sold not by Amazon or Samsung but by a third-party seller called ReNew Pros, which carries only a 78 percent positive rating.
This matters because shoppers already have fewer reliable price anchors this year, with component costs like RAM spiking and sellers under pressure to make discounts look dramatic. A list price set by the retailer itself is not a neutral baseline, and a flashy percentage-off badge can hide a seller with a track record worth checking. Free tools close that gap: CamelCamelCamel and Walmart's equivalent, Camelmart, chart real price history, while Amazon's own Alexa for Shopping, built on its Rufus assistant, can show up to a year of pricing data and set alerts for a specific item.
A discount is only as good as the price it's measured against, and this week a lot of those reference points look suspiciously convenient.