Prime Day Deals Are Mostly Just… the Price of Products Pre-Tariffs

I’m the writer who comes to you every time Amazon hosts its big blowout deal-a-thon to remind you that you shouldn’t shell out your hard-earned money just because there’s a big red “Prime Big Deal” sticker on it. Now that we’re in October and yet another Prime Day is upon us, we’ve noticed a new trend. Prices have spiked to the point that today’s “deals” are far less impactful than they once were. In some cases, products with supposed limited-time discounts cost what they used to cost back at launch.

This year’s October Prime Day (Amazon started exhausting us with two Prime Day events a year in 2023) isn’t as egregious as the company’s four-day shopping extravaganza back in July. I’ve been poring over the deals on the page from Tuesday through Wednesday, and I’m finding more honest discounts for consumer tech items, like a 2025 Asus ROG Strix G16 (with an older Intel Core i7-14650HX CPU and Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU) for $1,200 versus its list price of $1,500. Normally, Amazon and third-party retailers jack up the base price of a product to make the deals seem more extravagant than they are. Now, the prices can compare to past devices prior to Trump dropping his first set of international tariffs back in April.

Even if the deals this October seem more subdued and realistic, it’s only because suggested retail prices have skyrocketed due to Trump’s ongoing obsession with tariffs. The ROG Strix G16 from 2024 with a 13th-gen Intel chip and RTX 4060 normally went for between $1,250 and 1,350 throughout last year into June this year. Price history site Camelcamelcamel shows the price has not moved from $1,384.50 for the past several months. Newer parts will always demand higher prices, but 2025 has proved the egregious exception to the rule. The prices are higher in general compared to what they normally are, meaning the deals are that much less of a bargain for consumers.

Prime Day may be the only way to get some products at their pre-tariff price. The child-centric video game console called the Nex Playground was originally set to retail for $200. There’s a “limited time deal” on Amazon to take the price from its $250 list price back down to what it would have originally cost before June this year. Other devices show how the supposed “deals” are worse than they would have been without tariffs. Take the GoPro Hero13 Black from last year. GoPro isn’t releasing a successor, though there is a new Max2 360 camera. The Hero13 Black originally retailed for $400 MSRP. While Amazon has a special deal for the camera at $330 bundled with the wide-angle lens attachment (that bundle launched just before the July Prime Day), GoPro is also selling the base camera for $360, claiming the retail price is $430. Price history data shows how the device spiked to that price intermittently since before July and Amazon’s first 2025 Prime Day (or really, we should just call it “Prime Week at this point).

The deals aren’t great on Amazon, either

Pricing isn’t just wrong on Amazon. The tariff-born issues with deals are everywhere. Sean Hollister at The Verge first spotted what may be the first instance of an AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card for PC, selling for $550 on PC parts retailer Newegg. That’s what AMD promised us it would cost when the company first announced its GPUs back in February, but shortly after launch, third-party makers sold them for $600 or more. The card everybody wanted, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, went for well above its $600 MSRP. Even today, you can’t find that 4K-ready GPU for less than $650, on sale or otherwise. AMD’s poor communication to customers started this issue, but tariffs have only helped keep prices high. Only recently have prices on GPUs like Nvidia’s RTX 5080 come down to the original $1,000 suggested retail price.

Pricing can feel esoteric. We know of many gadgets whose prices spiked explicitly because of tariffs. Video game consoles were hit especially hard. A new PlayStation 5 costs $550, $50 more than it did in 2020. Xbox hiked the prices for its consoles twice in the span of a few months, and now a standard Xbox Series X costs $650, $150 more than it retailed for at launch. None of these devices are on sale for Prime Day. Perhaps they will receive a markdown during Black Friday. Whatever temporary price slashing comes in the future, they will necessarily be a worse deal than they would have been before Trump started his international trade war with every foreign nation and penguin-inhabited island.

Tariffs incentivized companies to increase prices or otherwise keep their products out of the U.S. entirely. Whether the tariffs warranted price increases or companies treated it as the best excuse to hike costs, it doesn’t matter anymore. We now live in a world where gadgets don’t get cheaper as they age—they may cost more. Trump’s import taxes are exacerbating the deals-obsessed online ecosystem that Amazon started with its first Prime Day back in 2015. The end result is that consumers won’t have any idea what products should be worth anymore.