Open any product on Shopee during a sale and you will see the same three things stacked together: a price, a higher price with a line through it, and a percentage in a coloured badge. Your eye reads them as a before and an after. That is exactly what they are designed to look like.
They are not. Only one of those three numbers is real, and it is not the one doing the persuading.
Where that number comes from
The crossed-out figure is a field in the seller’s own listing form. On Shopee it is stored alongside the product as the price before discount, and the seller types it in. Nobody verifies it against receipts. Nobody checks it against what the item sold for last week. It is a claim, submitted by the person who benefits from the claim.
The percentage badge is then calculated from it automatically. So the badge is not an independent measurement of anything — it is arithmetic performed on a number the seller chose. A seller who wants a bigger badge does not need a bigger discount. They need a bigger crossed-out price.
This is worth sitting with for a second, because it inverts how the badge feels. A 70% badge does not mean the seller cut deeply. It can just as easily mean they inflated confidently.
What a real reference price would look like
There is a number that would genuinely tell you whether today is a good day to buy: what the product actually sold for recently. Not what anyone claims it was worth — what it cost, on ordinary days, to people who were not being shown a countdown timer.
That number is knowable. It just is not on the listing, because nothing on the listing is obliged to look backwards. A product page shows you today. The seller supplies the past, and the seller is not a neutral witness to it.
The gap between those two things — the claimed past and the recorded past — is where fake sales live. When they agree, the discount is real. When the claimed past sits far above anything the product has actually charged, the discount is theatre.
Checking it yourself, in about twenty seconds
You do not need a tool for a rough version of this. Three habits get you most of the way:
- Search the product name and compare listings. Identical or near-identical items from several sellers will cluster around a real market price. If one listing’s crossed-out price sits far above that cluster while its actual price sits inside it, the discount is decoration.
- Distrust round numbers. Genuine former prices are messy — ₱487, ₱1,349. Inflated ones tend to be tidy, because someone picked them rather than charged them. ₱1,000 crossed out to ₱499 is a pattern worth a second look.
- Check whether the badge outlives the sale. A discount that is still there three weeks after the sale event ended was never a discount. It is the normal price wearing a costume.
What we do instead
SaleSniff records what a product actually costs, day after day, and keeps the history. When a sale starts, we do not ask the seller what the product used to be worth. We already know what it charged.
That is the whole idea. The claimed original price gets no weight at all in a Sniff Score — not a reduced weight, none. What counts is the distance between today’s price and the prices we watched the product hold when nobody was running a campaign.
A discount that survives that comparison is worth taking. Most of the loud ones do not.
Stop guessing. Start sniffing.
Track prices, detect fake sales, and find genuine deals — free.
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