Amazon 20% Discount Coming Off Original Price for Select Items, Effective Discount of up to 50%

It’s Amazon Prime Day with lots of special deals for Prime members. You may also recall that Amazon teamed up with Amex to offer 20% off when you use at least 1 MR point during payment.

Readers point out that on some of the Amazon sales, the 20% comes off the original price instead of the discounted price, giving an effective discount of far greater than 20%. For example, if you there’s a $200 item discounted to $100, and you get 20% off the original price, you’ll end up with a 40% discount and a total cost of just $60.

20% off activation link (affiliate links here and below)

A lot of us have already maxed out the 20% discount immediately and won’t be able to take advantage of this unless you find the offer on a new Amazon account. For those who still have the 20% offer, you’ll actually be getting significantly more than 20% off some items.

It’s not clear which deals Amazon calculate the 20% discount based on the original price and which they use the discounted price. I’m guessing that all Amazon devices will calculate based on the original price, giving you a discount of much more than 20% (let us know if you see otherwise). Some other deals on Amazon are working as well, even not Amazon devices, such as the Ring Doorbell and the Sennheiser headphones.

My theory is that the deals which Amazon themselves is taking the hit, they calculate based on the original price since that’s the real vendor price in their system, while items that the vendor worked with Amazon to lower their price in honor of Prime Day, the Amazon system recognizes the discounted price as the ‘real’ price and only gives the 20% discount based on the discounted price.

Some examples:

• Ring Video Doorbell Pro for $174 (reg. $249) – you’ll get 20% off the original price for a $49.80 discount, roughly a 28% discount.
• Amazon Fire TV Stick w/ Alexa Voice Remote: $19.99(regular $39.99) – you’ll get 20% off the original price for a $8 discount, a 40% total discount.
• Echo Show for $129.99 (usually $229.99) – you’ll get 20% off the original price for a 45.99 discount, roughly a 35% discount.
• Sennheiser HD 4.50 SE Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones for $99.95 (regular $199) – you’ll get 20% off the original price for a $40 discount, bringing down the cost to just $60.
• Another incredible example was discovered by Dansdeals where this $710 set of Lenox silverware is marked down to $112, and the 20% off coupon is discounting the full cost, resulting in the $112 price going down to $12 (max $100 discount). And this $340 set of Lenox dinnerware is discounted to $99.99, and gets 20% off the original price for a final cost of just $31.99.
• The sale on Bose headphones are working with the 20% discount as well resulting in prices as low as $69. We wrote about this in a dedicated post.

Here’s a link to all deals on Amazon devices. This trick will probably work on all of those Amazon devices, and will work on some regular, non-Amazon-device deals coming out throughout today and tomorrow. Let us know where you see it working. We’ve been adding any deals we see on our main Prime Day stickied post. 

Hat tip to reader Jordan