Reference prices explained

What a struck-through price represents and how to stop it from misleading you.

The struck-through price next to a deal price is a reference price supplied by the source feed. It is a comparison anchor, not a guarantee of what the product sold for yesterday.

Where reference prices come from

Merchants set list prices; marketplaces record typical prices; feeds pass one of these along. Each can lag the market or, on marketplace listings with third-party sellers, be set optimistically high.

How DealsChecked treats them

We display the reference price exactly as the source provides it, label it as a reference, and compute the saving from it transparently. We reject listings where the percentage and the price fields disagree, and our observed price history accumulates the prices we have actually seen for the product.

The practical rule

Decide with the current price against what the product is worth to you, use the dollar saving as context, and treat any comparison price - here or anywhere else - as a claim, not a fact.