Beware the Amazon Prime Day Fake Deals: How to Spot Genuine Bargains in 2025

We are in the throes of another Amazon Prime Day, with multiple other retailers also jumping into the fray and offering steep discounts — but not all is as it seems.

The phrase 'Do your research' has become a byword for just looking up anything on YouTube and concluding that the Royal Family are space lizards and other stupidities. But when it comes to looking at online sales prices it couldn't be more appropriate.

The concept of a sale is probably as old as capitalism itself. If so, the concept of hoodwinking consumers into buying stuff that is not actually discounted is undoubtedly the same age, as there are what can only be described as shenanigans taking place this year.

We analysed a popular website's 50 or so recommended Amazon Prime Day deals in the photography and video space and found a decidedly mixed bag of results.  

US tariff charges have complicated the picture a bit, but on the whole they fell into several categories:

The Genuine Bargain: When a Deal is Real

There are fewer of these than you might hope. A good starting place is to look for official campaigns. Some manufacturers such as DJI and Smallrig are offering steep discounts via their Amazon and online shops this year; it's always worth cross-referencing.

Typical Promo Pricing: Not a Once-in-a-Lifetime Offer

This is a wide category: a low price that has been reached before, often fairly recently. The point here is that it's not a once in a lifetime offer and the product you're after is likely to appear at that price again. It might even be available cheaper when we get to the major discounting event of the season during Black Monday next month.

The Frankly Fake: Discounts Built on Inflated Prices

Bargains that are essentially measured against artificially high previous prices. We found one Sony camera that had been offered at $2698 for a whole 7 days before being back down at $2198 once more for the sale with a pert 19% off label attached to it. The Nikon Z6 III, meanwhile, is listed on amazon.com at 11% off, but is currently selling at $200 more than it was in September.

Information is Power: Tools to Check if a Deal is Real

None of this should be a surpsie. Last year, the UK's Consumer Association website reported that four in 10 deals were cheaper at other times of the year than on Black Friday. And here's an ironic link to the Amazon.com listing of Cory Doctorow's latest book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It which, among many other things, details some of the sharp practices Amazon employs to separate you from your money.

There are tools that you can use to sift out the genuine offers from the simple grifting though. Price trackers such as Keepa or CamelCamelCamel will analyse Amazon listings and report back on whether a bargain is a genuine one or not. They'll also offer you future price alerts if you want to track prices moving forward. Websites such as RateBud and others, meanwhile, let you sift through the tsumani of 5 star AI-slop reviews to discover products that might genuinely match your needs. Even bog-standard genAIs will give you a better steer on products than just heading in cold or relying on retailers own 'helpful' chatbots.

And with Black Friday and Cyber Monday already looming, and forecast to be even bigger than ever this year, keeping your wits about you when spending your hard-earned dollars is probably going to be even more essential than before.