The Was Price is the strikethrough reference price shown next to a deal price. Amazon calls it the Typical Price and defines it as the median non-promotional price customers paid for the product over the last 90 days. It is derived from sales history rather than set by the seller.
Andrew Erickson is the founder of Inventory Hero. He has spent years working with Amazon FBA sellers on demand forecasting, restock planning, and the cash flow side of running a private-label brand. Inventory Hero exists because every spreadsheet-based inventory system he tried eventually broke — usually right before Q4.
The most common cause is crossing the threshold Amazon introduced on May 18, 2026. If more than half the days in your trailing 90-day price history sit below your non-promotional median, Amazon recalculates the Typical Price using all sales including promotional ones, which pulls it down. Competing offers and list price edits can also affect it.
How do I increase my Was Price on Amazon?
Get back under the threshold and wait. Because the calculation is a trailing 90-day window, the reference price recovers on its own once the majority of days sit at your non-promotional level again. There is no field to set it directly.
Do coupons lower your Was Price on Amazon?
Promotional sales are normally excluded from the Typical Price median, and Amazon's deal pricing guidance lists tailored coupons, Subscribe and Save, Buy X Get Y, and event-tied promotions among the excluded types. The important caveat is that once you cross the more-than-half-the-days threshold, Amazon includes all sales in the calculation.
Does a repricer affect your Amazon Was Price?
It can. Amazon's price history records the lowest Featured Offer price each day, so a repricer responding to competitors can put a majority of days below your non-promotional median without anyone deciding to run a discount. Audit the day count, not your intent.
Your Amazon Was Price is not the last price you listed. Amazon calls it the Typical Price and defines it as "the median non-promotional price customers paid for a product over the last 90 days."1 You do not set it directly. You can only change the sales history it is computed from, which means the reference price you will have in November is being set by how you price in August and September.
That matters more than it sounds, because your reference price is not just a display detail. It gates how deeply you are allowed to discount stock you have already committed to Q4.
The Was Price is the strikethrough number next to your deal price, the one that makes a discount look like a discount. Amazon derives it from your own sales history rather than letting you declare it, which is why two sellers running the same percentage off can show very different savings to the same shopper.
Typical Price
Amazon's term for the reference price shown as the strikethrough Was Price, defined as the median non-promotional price customers paid for a product over the trailing 90 days.
It is calculated per product, from that product's own price history. So a catalog-wide repricing policy can produce very different reference prices across your SKUs depending on how each one's individual history played out.
The base rule: take the trailing 90 days and find the median of the non-promotional prices customers paid. Promotional sales are excluded. This is why a short, sharp deal is invisible to your reference price. You ran it, customers bought at the deal price, and the median never saw those sales.
The override, effective May 18, 2026: if more than half the days in that 90-day price history sit below the non-promotional median, Amazon stops excluding promotional sales and calculates using all of them.1
Share of the 90-day window sitting below your non-promotional median
Which sales Amazon counts
Effect on the Was Price
Half or less
Non-promotional sales only
Reference price holds at your normal level
More than half
All sales, promotional included
Reference price drops toward what you have actually been charging
The second row is the one that surprises people. It does not shade the median down a little. It changes which sales are eligible for the calculation at all, so the number can move sharply the moment you cross.
Case A, the short promotion. You run a deal at $31.99 for 12 days and sell at $39.99 the other 78. Twelve days out of 90 is 13% of the window, comfortably under half. Promotional sales stay excluded, and your Typical Price remains anchored to $39.99.
Case B, the quiet drift. You never run a labeled promotion. But to stay competitive you let your price sit at $34.99 for 50 days out of the 90. That is 56% of the window below your non-promotional median, so you have crossed. Amazon now folds every sale into the calculation, and the reference price falls toward what you have actually been charging.
Case B is the more common failure precisely because it does not feel like promoting. It feels like pricing.
Amazon's deal pricing guidance lists several promotion types that sit outside the Typical Price calculation, including Buy X Get Y offers, Subscribe and Save pricing, tailored or targeted coupons, and promotions tied to major shopping events such as Prime Day.2
The strategic read is counterintuitive. The promotional tools that feel most aggressive are often the safest for your reference price, while the one that feels most conservative, quietly lowering your list price, is the one that does the damage. If you need to hold a lower effective price for weeks, a coupon does that without being a non-promotional price. Dropping your list price does not.
The caveat is the threshold above. Exclusion is the default behavior, not a guarantee. Once more than half your days sit below the non-promotional median, the exclusions stop protecting you, because Amazon has switched to counting everything.
This is where most of the real exposure lives, and it is the case the mechanic handles least intuitively.
Amazon's price history records the lowest Featured Offer price each day.1 It does not record your intent. A repricer reacting to competitor moves can put day after day below your non-promotional median without anyone ever deciding to run a discount, and the threshold does not care that an algorithm made the call.
It also breaks the clean two-price examples above. Across a quarter of active repricing you might touch six or eight price points, none of them a majority on its own. In that world the median genuinely does work, rather than just reporting whichever price you held longest, and you cannot eyeball your position. You have to count.
So audit it as a day count:
Pull your trailing 90 days of price history for the SKU.
Establish your non-promotional median, the middle value of the days you were not running an excluded promotion.
Count how many of the 90 days sit below it.
If that count is anywhere near 45, treat yourself as at risk, and remember that high-velocity discount days likely make your true position worse than the count suggests.
Sellers who reprice aggressively and deal frequently are the ones most likely to walk into Q4 with a reference price they cannot explain, because both behaviors push in the same direction and neither one feels like a decision.
The window is trailing and 90 days long, so the history that sets your Black Friday reference price is accumulating right now.
Keep the majority of days at your non-promotional price. Not all of them. Just more than half. That single constraint is what keeps the exclusion behavior working in your favor.
Use the excluded promotion types when you need sustained volume. Coupons and Subscribe and Save let you compete on effective price without adding days below your non-promotional median.
Price your clearance decisions honestly. If you are dropping price to move aging units, that is a legitimate trade, but it is a trade. Clearing excess inventory at the cost of your Q4 reference price is sometimes right and very often accidental. The same is true of leaning on price to lift a slow SKU's sell-through rate in August, which can quietly cost you the deal ceiling you wanted in November.
That trade-off is the part worth internalizing. Deal pricing and inventory planning are the same decision read from opposite ends: the discount you take today sets the floor you can defend on the stock you are ordering for the quarter. If you are sizing deal uplift for a specific event, our Prime Day inventory planning guide covers estimating the velocity multiplier, and the Q4 forecasting guide covers the order math behind it.
Your Amazon Was Price is a trailing 90-day median of non-promotional prices, and the lever you have on it is how many days you spend below that median. Stay under half and the exclusions hold. Cross it, deliberately or by letting a repricer do it for you, and Amazon starts counting every sale, which lowers the ceiling on every deal you run afterward. Before you schedule anything for Q4, count the days you have actually spent below your normal price this quarter.
Amazon Seller Forums, "Upcoming Improvements to Reference Pricing," Seller Central. Retrieved August 5, 2026. Amazon's stated definition and the May 18, 2026 threshold change are quoted from that announcement. ↩↩2↩3↩4
Summarized from Amazon's deal pricing and reference price guidance in Seller Central help (sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GFQCDTDE2HV9NMVV). Read the original for the authoritative list, since Amazon updates these terms. ↩