Prime Big Deal Days, October 2026: how many were real deals?

Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days ran on 6 and 7 October. Every deal had a red badge, a crossed-out price and a countdown. The question the badge can't answer is the one that matters: was that price actually low?

We had been recording the prices of the products on this site several times a day since early September, so we could check. We compared each product's lowest price during the event with what it usually cost in the four weeks before.

The short answer

We had enough history for 1,135 products that were on sale at Amazon during the event.

506 (45%) were at least 5% below their usual price at some point during the event.
189 (17%) were at least 20% below it.
610 (54%) had no real cut at all: their lowest event price was within 2% of what they usually cost.
132 (12%) cost more during the event than they usually did.
Of the 506 that were cut, 409 were back at their usual price within days.

So more than half of these products cost the same during the sale as on an ordinary day. The genuine deals were real, but they were short, and they sat among many prices that hadn't moved.

Real deals we saw

These fell well below what they had been selling for, and went back up afterwards:

Bose QuietComfort Headphones: usually $359.00, $169.00 during the event, $359.00 again by 11 October. Price history
Blink Outdoor 4 security camera: usually $129.99, $44.99 during the event, then $129.99 again. Price history
Waterpik Cordless Advanced water flosser: usually $98.99, $49.99 during the event, then $99.99. Price history
Cuisinart Glass Food Steamer: usually $199.92, $94.95 during the event, then $199.95. Price history

If you bought any of these during the event, you did well.

Same product, same price, different deal

The Amazon Echo Dot shows why a badge alone tells you little. During the event it was $39.99 in every colour we track. In two colours that was half its usual $79.99: a genuine deal. In the third colour we track, $39.99 was simply its usual price: it had been selling for that all along.

The badge looked the same on all three.

Not a deal

Some well-known products were not cut at all during the event, and a few cost more than usual:

Ninja Luxe Café Pro Series: usually $599.95; the lowest we recorded during the event was $749.95. Price history
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 (256GB): usually $1,349.99; $1,399.99 during the event. Price history
Dyson V15 Detect Origin: $589.99 during the event, the same as usual. Since then we've recorded $809.99. Price history
KitchenAid Artisan 5-Qt stand mixer (white): $379.95 during the event, the same as usual, and $479.00 afterwards. Price history

The last two point to something worth knowing: for some products, the event price wasn't a cut, but it was still lower than the price that came after it.

Where the cuts were

By category, the share of products at least 5% below their usual price during the event:

Electronics: 131 of 253 (52%)
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry: 123 of 245 (50%)
Health & Household: 23 of 44 (52%)
Home & Kitchen: 150 of 328 (46%)
Beauty & Personal Care: 29 of 64 (45%)
Baby Products: 18 of 39 (46%)
Toys & Games: 12 of 72 (17%)
Sports & Outdoors: 6 of 58 (10%)

Electronics and clothing were the best places to look. Toys and sporting goods hardly moved, so if you were waiting for the event to buy those, the wait didn't save you much.

How to tell a real deal next time

Black Friday is on 27 November. Before you buy:

Ignore the crossed-out price. It's the store's own claim about the past. Look for what the product actually sold for in recent weeks.
Check more than one colour or size. As the Echo Dot shows, the same "deal" can be real for one and not another.
A short deal isn't always the best price. Several products we track were cheaper during the event than afterwards, and the reverse was also true.
Check the price history. Every product page on this site shows what we've recorded, so you can see whether today's price is low or just labelled that way.

How we measured this

We record the price of every product on this site several times a day. For each product, its "usual price" is the median of everything we recorded from 8 September until the event began at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on 6 October. That's about four weeks, so it means usual recently, not usual all year. We left out products with fewer than eight recordings before the event. The "during" price is the lowest we recorded on 6 and 7 October (Pacific time), and the "after" price is the latest we recorded from 11 October on.

These are Amazon prices for the products we track, not every deal Amazon ran. They are what we recorded, and you can check any of them against the price history on the product's own page.