It is common to read that Amazon discounts are measured from a made-up list price. We believed a version of that ourselves: until October 4, 2026, our own price checks warned about a product’s list price without first looking at whether Amazon.ca displayed it.
So we looked. On October 5, 2026 we opened the Amazon.ca product page of each of the 68 products on our curated deals list and recorded the price, any struck-through price beside it and its label. This guide reports what the pages showed, and what that changes about how to read an Amazon.ca price.
What we checked, and its limits
The 68 products are the ones on SaveIQ’s deals pages: everyday items such as batteries, pens, kitchen tools, baby products and small electronics, priced from about $5 to $63. We chose them for the deals list, so they are not a random sample of Amazon.ca.
We read each product page once, on one day, from one delivery location in Alberta. Two pages had no offer to buy, which leaves 66 pages with a price. We did not look at search results, deal pages or sale events, where the display can differ.
For the comparison we used the last 90 days of price history for each product, which we buy from Keepa. That history was pulled on October 4, one day before the page reading.
What the 66 pages showed
On 47 of the 66 pages there was no comparison price at all. Twenty-nine showed only the price. Seventeen showed a Subscribe & Save offer, where the struck-through “One-Time Price” is simply today’s price and the 5% or 10% is the subscription discount, and one showed a “New condition price” equal to today’s price.
Eight pages showed a “List Price”, ten showed a “Was” price, and one showed a “New Price” line because the offer in the buy box was not a new item.
So on this list, a shopper landing on a product page saw a percentage off a higher reference price on 19 pages of 66, fewer than one in three.
| What the page showed | Pages |
|---|---|
| The price only | 29 |
| Subscribe & Save, with the “One-Time Price” equal to today’s price | 17 |
| A “New condition price” equal to today’s price | 1 |
| A “Was” price | 10 |
| A “List Price” | 8 |
| A “New Price” (the buy-box offer was not a new item) | 1 |
Were the list prices that did appear inflated?
For five of the eight, no. The product had sold at or above the displayed List Price at some point in the previous 90 days. The largest of them was a water bottle shown at 27% off a $23.11 List Price; its average price over the 90 days was $27.45, so the saving was real.
For the other three, the List Price was higher than any price in our 90-day record: $11.99 against a highest price of $10.76, $22.97 against $21.48, and $29.99 against $28.49. The discounts shown from them were 10%, 6% and 5%.
That does not mean those three break Amazon’s own rule. Amazon.ca says it displays a List Price when at least half of the product’s Amazon.ca sales in the past 180 days were at or above it, or when other retailers offered the product at or above it in that period. Our record covers 90 days and only Amazon.ca, so we cannot test either condition.
The “Was” prices held up
Amazon.ca says the Was Price is calculated from the product’s price history on Amazon.ca. On the ten pages that showed one, none was higher than the highest price in our 90-day record, and five were equal to it.
A Was price equal to the 90-day high is still worth a second look. It tells you the product did cost that much recently, but not for how long. For those five, the average price over the 90 days was 1% to 11% below the Was price.
Where the inflated number really is
The catalogue data behind a product often carries a list price that the page never shows. In our data, 30 of these products had a catalogue list price above the price they sold for that day, and for 19 of them it was above every price of the last 90 days.
Amazon.ca displayed that list price on 3 of the 19. The other 16 pages did not show it. A dog ball launcher had a catalogue list price of $148.59 and sold for $15.98; a USB flash drive had $105.00 against $35.99. Neither page showed a struck-through price.
This is the trap we fell into. A site, an extension or a deal post that works out “% off” from the catalogue list price will report discounts that Amazon.ca itself does not advertise. We changed the wording of our own checks on October 4 for that reason: they now compare the list price with the price history and do not say Amazon shows it.
What this means when you shop
Most of the time an Amazon.ca product page gives you a price and nothing to compare it with. The missing piece is not a fake discount to see through, it is the absence of any history. Whether $24.98 is good for a pair of headphones is not something the page tells you.
When a page does show a List Price or a Was price, treat it as a fair hint and check it against the last 90 days. In this sample the hint was usually sound, and the cases where it was not were small.
Be more careful with a percentage quoted away from Amazon’s own page, such as in a deal post, an email or a browser tool. Ask what the percentage is measured from. If the answer is a list price, look at what the product actually sold for.
A free price check on SaveIQ, Keepa or camelcamelcamel shows the lowest, average and highest price of the period. SaveIQ is this site.