Samsung’s QN900F is a 65-inch flagship 8K TV. At Newegg it’s on sale. It was also on sale yesterday. And the day before. In fact, in the 60 days we’ve been watching it, there wasn’t a single day it sold at its “regular” price.
That’s not a deal. That’s just the price - wearing a discount costume.
We run a price tracker that records what tech products actually sell for, every day, across major US retailers - about 97,000 product listings at the time of writing. This lets us ask a question shoppers can’t answer from a product page: is this sale real, or is the “sale price” simply what this product always costs?
What we measured
For every listing we record two numbers every day: the price you’d actually pay, and the crossed-out “was” price the retailer displays next to it. Tracking both is what makes this comparison possible - the retailer tells us what the discount is supposed to be, and our history tells us what the product really sells for.
From that history we compute each listing’s normal price: the median of its last 90 days - the price half of our daily observations sit above and half below. A genuine discount is a price meaningfully below that normal price. Then we count how many of the last 60 days the listing spent in a “discounted” state.
A product that’s below its normal price a few days a month is having sales. A product that’s below it on 45 or more of the last 60 days has a fictional regular price - we call that a perma-sale.
The numbers, as of July 7, 2026
Across the roughly 97,000 listings with enough history to judge, 3,122 are in a permanent-sale state. It’s not evenly distributed:
| Retailer | Tracked listings | Perma-sale listings | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 35,436 | 2,255 | 6.4% |
| Newegg | 26,294 | 504 | 1.9% |
| Best Buy | ~19,500 | ~280 | ~1.4%* |
| B&H Photo | 10,397 | 71 | 0.7% |
| Adorama | 4,959 | 1 | 0.02% |
*Best Buy lists new, open-box, and refurbished stock at the same product URL, which can mix conditions in a price history and overstate this signal - we’re refining that measurement and have marked its figures approximate. The Amazon and Newegg numbers are not affected in any material way.
One in sixteen Amazon tech listings, by this measure, is “discounted” so persistently that the discount has no meaning. Part of the reason Amazon leads this table is who sells there: its marketplace carries thousands of no-name import brands whose listings launch with a crossed-out price and never leave the “sale” state - many spend 90%+ of their days “discounted”. Big-brand listings on Amazon do it too, just less often.
Case study: the flagship TV that’s always on sale
Samsung QN900F QN65QN900FFXZA 65"
Newegg has offered this 65” Samsung 8K flagship below its own typical price every single day for the last 60 days we tracked it. The current “deal” sits about 5% below its normal price - on a $3,000 TV, that’s a rounding error dressed up as an event. If you’ve been waiting for the sale to end before judging the sale: it doesn’t. The steady markdown may simply be end-of-cycle inventory clearing ahead of newer models - and our tracking supports that reading: several stores that carried this TV earlier this year no longer list it.
Усі характеристики, історія цін і відгуки власників →It’s not just the expensive stuff
Acer Aspire Go 15.6" AG15-71P-794K silberfarben 2025
Same pattern, budget shelf: this everyday Acer Aspire Go 15 has been “discounted” at Newegg every day for the last 60 days - with the “sale” price only about 6% below its normal price. A shopper seeing the sale banner reasonably assumes urgency. The data says there’s nothing to hurry for: this is simply what the laptop costs.
Усі характеристики, історія цін і відгуки власників →How to check any “deal” in ten seconds
- Ignore the crossed-out price. It’s a marketing artifact, not a measurement.
- Look at the price history. Every product page on PriceZen carries the tracked price chart - if the “sale” price is the line’s normal altitude, the discount is fiction.
- Compare against the normal price, not the crossed-out one. Our deal listings rank by discount vs what the product typically sells for, not vs whatever number the retailer crossed out.
Methodology & limitations
Prices are recorded from public product pages and retailer APIs, typically multiple times per day per listing - both the selling price and the crossed-out “was” price where one is shown. A listing’s “normal price” is its median selling price over the last 90 days, computed per listing (one retailer, one country - US shown here). “Perma-sale” means the listing sat below its own normal price on at least 45 of the last 60 days. We are conservative in what we name: the two case studies above have 65+ days of tracking history and their pattern holds on every day of the window. Where a retailer’s page structure can mix new and open-box prices in a single history (noted for Best Buy above), we flag the figure as approximate rather than publish a precise number we can’t stand behind.
This is the first article in an ongoing series on price integrity. Since early July we also record the “was” prices retailers themselves display. As that dataset matures, we’ll move from “the sale never ends” to naming specific claims - the advertised discount vs the discount you actually got.