How to Check the Real Savings on Amazon Gold Box Deals

Have you ever heard of Amazon gold box? Well, if you haven’t, then make sure to check it out here. Basically, Amazon gold box is their daily deal offerings across all of their categories. These are daily deals, lightening deals, and just plain savings. It even includes their coupons, which you can instantly clip. Amazon tends to highlight two specials for their “daily deals” section at the top of the gold box. They will then highlight a number of lightening deals, which go away after the time has expired or the quantity is gone.

Now, since I’m a fan of Amazon and a dedicated Amazon shopper, I check the gold box deals often. Why? You never know what you might find.  They put a wide assortment on sale, so I check it often. At the end of the post, I will show you how to get the daily deal emails delivered to you without going to Amazon (free of charge). Before we get to that point, I wanted to provide you with a little information on how Amazon does pricing for its daily deals and gold box deals. They indicate massive savings, but that is really not true. You are saving money, but the percentage off is misleading.

How to Know if Amazon Gold Box Deals are True Deals

Amazon is the biggest retailer around. They are the 800-lb gorilla (overtaking Walmart!). They know how to get people to buy. Remember all of the media attention to Prime Day? Well, I shopped that day and the deals were not great. Yes, I did score a Fire TV Stick for $25 and a watch for my wife, but those were all luck. Most of the deals were junk. Yet, people were there shopping and browsing and they had their biggest sales day. Can’t complain with that!

When Amazon puts something into their gold box, they want to make sure to attract buyers. In order to do this, they fudge the savings amount a tad. Below is an example of how they show pricing for daily deals. You can click the picture to check out their gold box deals.

This looks like a normal listing on Amazon. It has the product image, the title, reviews, description, and the pricing. They also add in when the deal ends and how much you are saving on the deal.

In this example, the 56% savings on the Dremel 12-Volt Max tool looks promising. I do have a Dremel tool and love it, so I didn’t need this product, but the pricing intrigued me.

Amazon lists the price as $170.52, which is extremely high for a Dremel tool with just some attachments that I can pick up from Lowe’s or Home Depot. I decided to investigate and it’s what I do when searching all of the deals in Amazon’s gold box.

Check out Amazon Gold Box Deals

Researching the Gold Box Deals

I was lucky when writing this post because the Dremel daily deal sold out and went back to regular price (or what Amazon really charges). They only show you the $170.52 when you want to buy it and it’s in the gold box. This shows a higher percentage off (56%). What you really need to know is how much are people buying it for when it’s not in the gold box deal section. For that, we can go two different routes.

Using CamelCamelCamel

Weird name, but good service. I uncovered this service when writing my popular post about unknown ways to save money at Amazon. This free website allows you to easily track the pricing of a product on Amazon. This is just an Amazon service. All you have to do is enter the product URL or ASIN in the search box on CamelCamelCamel.com. The service will do the rest.

If you want to know how to find the ASIN, then just look in the URL when you’re on the Amazon product page. It’s a strange sequence of letters and numbers, but it looks like below.

Once you enter the information, CamelCamelCamel will give you a wealth of knowledge regarding the price. It will give you a graph tracking it over the last 50 price changes. It then puts it into a nice little table for you to help you discern the pricing changes. It looks like this for our example.

You can see that today (8/26) was the lowest price of the tracking period and the average was $96.77. In this instance, you are saving $21.78 on the average price. That’s not a bad deal, but it’s not the 56% they are showing you on the gold box deals page.

Search Google Really Quick

Another great way to look at pricing is to just use the old Googles. You can easily put in the product and see what comes up. Since Google has a product called Google Shopping, they have a ton of data from a wide number of retailers. This allows you to leverage Google to find the information you need. Here is what came up when I was searching for the Dremel daily deal.

You can see from these results that the lowest price is $87.48, but it might not include shipping. If we just went off that price, then you would only be saving $12.49 at the low end. Still not a bad deal, especially if that low price doesn’t include shipping.

When you search Google, make sure you either use the Amazon product title or the part number listed in the product information section. This way it gives you a good comparison.

So, is a Gold Box Deal Really a Deal?

The answer to this question is simply yes and no. While you are saving money when purchasing an item in the gold box deals section, you aren’t realizing the savings Amazon says you are. For the Dremel tool example, I was able to get the regular price they charge, when it’s not on daily deal. Yes, it fluctuates based on the findings from CamelCamelCamel, but it’s never been $170, nor does anyone sell it at that price. So, the 56% savings they say you get, really only boils down to much smaller savings. In this case, the regular price is $99.99 with free shipping (as shown below).

The Amazon Gold Box Deal said $74.99, so really, you are saving $25, not $95.53. That’s a pretty substantial change if you ask me. This boils down to a much smaller 25% savings than the advertised 56% savings.

I put this post together to show you how to research and make sure you’re getting a good deal when searching the Amazon gold box deals. If you want to get their daily deals in your email every morning, then all you need to do is head to this link and sign up for their emails. It’s free and they only send one a day with the two daily deals they have for each day. This way you can see if a product interests you or not.

Have you scored any good deals lately on Amazon gold box deals?