Amazon Price History Now Covers a Full Year. I Read the Three Documents That Decide Whether a Crossed Out Price Was Ever Real.

“John Doe is a retailer of Brand X fountain pens, which cost him $5 each.” His regular retail price, at a 50 percent markup, is $7.50. Then: “In order subsequently to offer an unusual ‘bargain’, Doe begins offering Brand X at $10 per pen.”

Doe holds the inflated price for a few days, drops back to $7.50, and advertises the drop as a terrific bargain. The passage comes from the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, filed at 32 FR 15534 on November 8, 1967, and it’s still the operative federal text on what a crossed out number is allowed to be.

What makes the advertisement false isn’t the size of the discount. It’s the duration of the higher price.

That’s the whole trouble with a strikethrough, and it has always been trouble you couldn’t see. The rule turns on how long a price was posted. A shopper standing in front of one price on one day has no way to measure length.

Which brings us to the thing Amazon put next to the price.

Since May, Amazon has been rolling out a 365 day view of price history on product detail pages, extending the 30 and 90 day views it launched in 2024. Retail Insight Network reported the expansion on May 6, 2026, and PYMNTS covered it again on June 30. Amazon’s own explainer says the feature is “currently available to all customers in the U.S., UK, Canada, and India,” with the year long view “now rolling out” in the U.S., UK and India. The company says over 50 million customers have used it, at an average of three checks a month.

Credit where the paperwork earns it. A year of history, sitting beside the price instead of inside a browser extension, is more history than any American pricing rule actually requires, and Amazon publishes it without a Prime membership attached.

The company also says plainly what it’s for: deciding “whether a Prime Day price is lower than what the item typically costs.”

Prime Big Deal Days runs October 6 and 7 this year, apparel among the named categories. So the instrument finally exists. The question is which rule it can measure.

What does Amazon price history actually show?

Amazon’s explainer describes three windows, 30, 90 and 365 days, reachable either from a link beside the price or by asking the shopping assistant questions like “Is this the lowest price recently?” Amazon renamed that assistant from Rufus to Alexa for Shopping on May 13, 2026. The company’s own example of the use case is a garment: “trying to guess if a winter coat is at its lowest price.”

Read the same page for what it declines to specify and the list gets long. The explainer never says which number the line plots. Not whether it follows the Buy Box or the lowest offer on the page. Not whether a third party seller’s price enters the same line as Amazon’s own. Not whether a clipped coupon or a Subscribe and Save discount is drawn in or netted out afterward. And for clothing, the one that decides everything: whether a size and color variation carries its own history or inherits the parent listing’s, which matters because one jacket listing routinely holds a dozen sizes and colors that don’t all carry the same price. Four silences, all load bearing.

The page also says the feature appears on “eligible” detail pages.

Eligible goes undefined.

I should be exact about my own limits here. This desk didn’t open a single Amazon listing to check any of that. Amazon’s robots file instructs our crawler to stay out of amazon.com, and we don’t dress up as a browser to get around it, so what follows is a reading of published documents rather than of charts. Where the documents are silent, I’m saying they’re silent. I’m not saying I looked and found nothing.

Are fake discounts illegal?

Fake discounts are governed by guides and statutes that turn on duration, and the federal text sets a standard without ever setting a number. Section 233.1(b) asks that a former price be one “at which the product was openly and actively offered for sale, for a reasonably substantial period of time, in the recent, regular course of his business, honestly and in good faith.”

Reasonably substantial. No number follows.

California is the one that counts days. Business and Professions Code section 17501 says no price may be advertised as a former price “unless the alleged former price was the prevailing market price… within three months next immediately preceding the publication of the advertisement or unless the date when the alleged former price did prevail is clearly, exactly and conspicuously stated in the advertisement.”

Three months. Which is to say that the 90 day chart Amazon has offered since 2024 was already, by accident or otherwise, the exact length of California’s ruler.

Here’s how the three documents line up against the three settings.

The rule	What it requires	Window that can test it	What no window shows
FTC 16 CFR 233.1(b)	Former price “openly and actively offered” for “a reasonably substantial period”	90 or 365	No number is given, so no chart closes the question
FTC 16 CFR 233.1(d)	A price from “some remote period in the past” must be disclosed as remote	365 only	Whether the seller disclosed it
CA Bus. & Prof. Code 17501	Prevailing within three months, or the date stated conspicuously	90, exactly	Whether the price prevailed in the market or was merely posted
FTC 16 CFR 233.3	A list price must match substantial sales in the trade area	None	Every other seller’s price

The 30 day view tests nothing here.

The 365 day view, though, is the first consumer facing instrument that reaches far enough back to catch what 233.1(d) describes, a price “not used in the recent past but at some remote period in the past, without making disclosure of that fact.” Twelve months of line is enough to show a shelf that sat there for one week in August.

What does list price mean on Amazon?

List price is the manufacturer’s suggested number rather than the seller’s own former price, and the FTC treats the two as different animals. Section 233.3 is unusually blunt about how little the first one means: “Today, only in the rare case are all sales of an article at the manufacturer’s suggested retail or list price.” The guide was written in 1967 and the sentence has aged into an understatement.

This is where a price history chart stops being useful, and where clothing sits. A list price isn’t a claim about what this seller charged last month. It’s a claim about what the trade area charges, and 233.3 says it isn’t fictitious only if it matches the price at which “substantial” sales are made across the advertiser’s area.

A chart of one listing on one site can’t see the trade area. It can’t see any other retailer at all.

Apparel carries two more wrinkles the same guide names directly. The FTC says a manufacturer “may not affix price tickets containing inflated prices as an accommodation to particular retailers,” which is preticketing, the hangtag arriving with the comparison already printed on it. And section 233.5 says sellers “should not offer seconds or imperfect or irregular merchandise at a reduced price without disclosing that the higher comparative price refers to the price of the merchandise if perfect.”

Neither fact appears on a price line. We’ve written before about how a compare at price differs from a former price, and about what an extra 50% off is calculated from.

Read the window before the percentage

Three practical consequences fall out of the table, and none of them require trusting anyone’s adjectives.

Set the chart to 365 and read the shape, not the endpoint. The rules ask how long the higher price sat there, so a line that climbs in mid September and falls on October 6 is answering a different question than a line that held for eight months. A short plateau before an event is exactly the shape Doe’s pens would have drawn.

Treat a strikethrough against a list price as unmeasured rather than false. Section 233.3 sends you to other retailers, and no price history on any single site can go there. That’s a job for price matching and for the separate question of whether a store will adjust a price after you buy.

And take the coupon question outside the chart. Amazon never states whether clipped coupons and subscription discounts are drawn into the line, so a history that looks flat can still sit above or below what you’d actually pay at checkout.

Read the cart, not the graph.

The event starts at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on October 6 and ends at 11:59 p.m. on October 7. Whether the clothing in it is worth buying at all is a question we took up separately in our October Prime Day audit.

Doe’s pens are still the cleanest illustration anyone has written of a fake discount, and for 59 years the joke in that passage was that the shopper had no way to catch him. She could only see $10 crossed out and $7.50 printed beside it.

A 365 day chart is the first instrument handed to her that would show those few days plainly, a small flat shelf at $10 with eleven months of $7.50 running underneath.

What it wouldn’t tell her is whether a few days is long enough to be illegal. The FTC declined to say in 1967 and hasn’t said since. So the chart shows her the shape of the thing and hands the verdict straight back to her, which is a better position than she’s ever been in. It still isn’t the same as knowing.