How to spot a FAKE discount before you buy

A big red “−55%” feels great. But a discount is only real if the crossed-out “was” price is real. Here’s how stores fake it — and the simple check that protects you.

Why a “55% off” can be worth nothing

Imagine a pair of earphones that normally sells for 300 EGP. For one week, the seller quietly raises the listed price to 700 EGP. Then they “drop” it back to 300 and slap a “−57%” badge on it. Nothing actually got cheaper — 300 is the normal price — but it looks like the deal of the month. This trick has a name: an inflated reference price, or a fake “was”.

Real example we caught. A popular earphone was shown at “EGP 290, was EGP 473 — 38% off.” But when we looked at its price history, it had sold at ~299 EGP almost every single day. The 473 was a brief spike. So the “deal” was really the normal price wearing a discount badge. We do not call that a genuine deal.

The 4 tricks to watch for

The inflated “was”. The crossed-out price is higher than the product has actually sold for recently.
The permanent “sale”. If something is “50% off” every single day for months, the sale price is the real price.
The lonely spike. The price jumps up for a few days, then “drops” — timed perfectly with a sale event.
The look-alike bundle. A cheaper or smaller version is shown at the price of the premium one to make the discount look bigger.

The 60-second check that beats all four

You don’t need software. You need one question: “What does this product usually cost?” A genuine deal is priced clearly below the normal price — not below a number that appeared last Tuesday.

Search the product name across Amazon, Noon and Jumia. If two stores sell it near the “sale” price, that is the normal price.
Ignore the crossed-out number. Judge the price on its own: would you be happy paying this if there were no badge at all?
Check the price history if you can. A real drop shows a line that was higher for a long time, then fell — not a one-week bump.

The DealHunter rule

We track each product’s price over time and compare today’s price to its typical (normal) price — never to a crossed-out “was”. If it’s meaningfully below normal, it’s a real deal. If it’s just sitting at its usual price with a fancy badge, we say so. We’d rather show you fewer deals than lie about a fake one. That honesty is the entire reason DealHunter exists.

What we show, and why some prices link out

For Noon and Jumia, we show the current listed price and discount. For Amazon, prices change very often, so instead of showing a number that might be stale by the time you click, we send you straight to the live Amazon listing for today’s exact price. It’s the honest way to do it.

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