Amazon List Price vs your price: is it real?

What Amazon’s labels mean

Amazon’s help page on strike-through pricing defines them. The List Price is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and except for books Amazon shows it only if customers bought the item on Amazon, or other retailers offered it, at or above that price in the past 90 days — 180 days for seasonal goods such as ski jackets and shoes. The policy names no minimum number of such sales, and another store’s asking price counts.

The Typical Price is a different number: the median price customers paid for the item on Amazon over 90 days, leaving out prices from limited-time promotions. It describes Amazon’s own sales, which makes it the more useful of the two struck-through prices.

“Lowest price in 30 days” means today’s price is at or below the lowest featured-offer price on Amazon in that period. On a Renewed listing the struck-through figure can be the price of the new item, and on a Subscribe & Save offer it is the one-time price.

What the rule actually says

US advertising rules are narrower than most shoppers assume. The FTC’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR 233.1) allow a former-price comparison only where the higher price was the seller’s actual, bona fide price, openly offered for a reasonably substantial period of time — not a price invented to make a reduction look larger.

Nothing in that rule requires a retailer to show you the evidence, and nothing checks it before the badge appears. Enforcement is after the fact and rare. So the crossed-out number reaches you unverified.

The three claims worth separating

Manufacturer’s suggested price (MSRP) is a number the manufacturer publishes. It can be years old and may never have been charged by anyone. It is not evidence about this retailer.

A former price is what this retailer charged before. That is the only comparison that tells you something about today’s price — and it is the one you cannot see on a product page.

A competitor’s price is a fourth thing again. A discount measured against a rival’s number tells you about the rival, not about whether this is a good time to buy.

How to check one in about thirty seconds

Find the same item at the same retailer in a price history — ours or anyone’s. Look for the highest price actually recorded in the last 90 days. If the claimed “was” price sits above that line, nobody has observed the retailer charging it recently.

Then ignore the percentage entirely and look at the median. A price below its own 90-day median is cheap for that item at that shop, whatever the badge says; a price at the median is ordinary even when the badge says 40% off.

What we do with it

We record every price we see, per retailer, and we never adopt a retailer’s comparison price as our own. When a claimed former price sits above everything we have observed, we say so on the card in plain words instead of printing the discount.

We also refuse to make a claim at all until we have at least seven days of recorded prices for that product at that retailer. Seven is not a magic number; it is the point below which "lowest we have seen" says more about how little we have watched than about the price.