Amazon Cracks Down on Inflated Discounts With New Pricing Rules Starting April 23
Amazon is tightening the rules around how sellers display reference prices on product listings, with two key deadlines that will force many merchants to rethink pricing strategies that have long relied on inflated list prices to manufacture the appearance of savings.
What Is Changing and When
The changes affect two pricing mechanisms: the List Price and the Typical Price.
Starting April 23, 2026, a seller-submitted List Price must meet at least one of two conditions to be accepted as valid. Either the product must have been purchased by customers as the Featured Offer on Amazon at that price, or the product must have been offered at that price by another retailer recently. Seller assertion alone is no longer sufficient. If a List Price cannot be substantiated, Amazon will not display it, and the strike-through discount that many sellers rely on to drive conversions will disappear from the listing.
A second deadline follows on May 18, 2026, when Amazon changes how it calculates the Typical Price. Under the updated method, promotional sales will be counted when a product's price is below its non-promotional median for more than half of any 90-day period. This closes a loophole where sellers maintained persistent promotional pricing to keep apparent discounts visible while never actually selling at the stated reference price.
Coupons, Buy X Get Y offers, Subscribe and Save, and peak event pricing are excluded from the recalculation.
Why This Matters for Sellers
The strike-through display, which shows a higher reference price crossed out next to the current selling price, is one of the most effective conversion tools available to Amazon sellers. Shoppers use it as a shortcut for evaluating value. Listings that lose this display due to unverifiable reference prices will likely see lower click-through and conversion rates, directly affecting revenue.
The practical issue for many sellers is that their current List Prices were set at levels where few or no actual transactions occurred at that price. Under the new rules, those prices fail the verification test immediately. Sellers who have used persistent promotions to maintain visibility while keeping a high reference price in place face a similar problem under the Typical Price update.
Amazon has been signaling this direction for some time. Its Seller Central guidance published in March 2026 explicitly warned sellers against suggesting artificially high List Prices, noting that doing so could result in the display being disabled and the account being flagged for a policy violation. The April and May deadlines formalize enforcement of what was previously stated as policy guidance.
What Sellers Need to Do Now
The window before April 23 is short. Sellers should audit their current List Prices against their actual sales history on Amazon and check whether those prices are reflected at other retailers. If neither condition is met, the List Price needs to be updated or removed before the deadline.
For sellers running ongoing promotions, the Typical Price change requires a review of how frequently products are sold at promotional versus non-promotional prices. If a product has been in near-constant promotion for 90 days or more, the promoted price may become the new Typical Price baseline, eliminating the discount display entirely.
Advertising campaigns linked to promoted listings also need review. A Sponsored Products campaign driving traffic to a listing that no longer shows a reference price will convert at a lower rate, increasing cost per acquisition without any change to bidding or targeting. Sellers should factor this into their ad budget assumptions before both deadlines hit.
The enforcement risks are real. Under Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy, misleading reference prices can result in removal of the Featured Offer or suspension of selling privileges. Sellers who do not act before April 23 risk both losing the conversion benefit of their current pricing displays and triggering account health issues at the same time.
