Is 20% off a good deal? It depends what you are buying
A discount only means something next to a baseline. Twenty percent off a laptop is a good day. Twenty percent off women's clothing is a quiet Tuesday. Without knowing which, the number on the tag tells you very little.
So we went through 24,130 deals from our own five-year history and worked out the median discount for every category with enough data to be worth quoting. The spread is much wider than we expected.
The typical discount, by category
Median discount, so half of all deals in that category were deeper and half were shallower. The count is how many deals the figure is based on, which is the part that tells you how much to trust it.
| Category | Typical discount | Deals |
|---|---|---|
| Home Improvement | 58.5% | 193 |
| Women's clothing | 52.7% | 574 |
| Mobile phone | 50.5% | 903 |
| Men's clothing | 50.0% | 649 |
| Clothing & Accessories | 46.6% | 3,297 |
| Fitness | 46.2% | 188 |
| Entertainment | 45.5% | 1,136 |
| Personal care | 45.1% | 471 |
| Home | 44.4% | 406 |
| Shoes | 42.3% | 931 |
| Health & Beauty | 40.6% | 722 |
| Toys and Games | 39.9% | 619 |
| Sunglasses | 38.2% | 388 |
| Electronics | 37.1% | 774 |
| Appliances | 35.0% | 1,565 |
| TV | 34.4% | 748 |
| Cameras | 33.4% | 315 |
| Computer accessories | 32.1% | 797 |
| Laptop | 31.9% | 648 |
| Kitchen and dining | 30.7% | 192 |
| Automotive | 30.0% | 322 |
| Beverages | 27.0% | 451 |
| Kids and Baby | 22.3% | 40 |
One caveat on the table above. Our category list contains a handful of duplicate entries that differ only by a leading space, which splits a category across two rows. Where that happens we have quoted the larger row. Cleaning that up may move these numbers slightly.
What this actually tells you
Clothing discounts deeply and often. Women's clothing sits at 52.7%, men's at 50.0%, and the broader clothing category at 46.6% across 3,297 deals. That is the most reliable figure in the table simply because it rests on the most data. If you are looking at clothing and the tag says 30% off, that is a below-average discount, not a bargain.
Technology discounts shallowly. Laptops at 31.9%, computer accessories at 32.1%, cameras at 33.4%, TVs at 34.4%. These are categories where the margin is thinner and the retailer has less room to move. On a laptop, 30% off really is close to as good as it usually gets, and holding out for a clothing-sized discount means holding out a long time.
Mobile phones are the exception in tech. At 50.5% across 903 deals they behave more like clothing than like laptops, which is mostly about older handsets being cleared when a new model lands.
Be careful with the small samples. Home Improvement tops the table at 58.5%, but on 193 deals. Kids and Baby sits at the bottom at 22.3% on only 40. Both are real figures and both could move a lot on another year of data. The categories in the middle of the table, with counts in the hundreds or thousands, are the ones to lean on.
A rough rule
Take the number for your category above. A discount meaningfully below it is an ordinary price wearing a sale sticker. A discount meaningfully above it is worth a closer look. That is a blunter instrument than it sounds, but it beats reacting to whatever percentage happens to be printed on the tag.
Figures come from an analysis of our own deal history: 24,130 deals posted between 2021 and 2026, of which 72.3% carried a price and an earlier price we could compare. The analysis was last run on 13 August 2026.