Amazon's strikethrough ("typical price") badge, sale-price flag, and coupon badge can be combined on a single listing to make it look like a bigger deal than the underlying price stage alone would suggest. The strikethrough price is computed by Amazon from the listing's own price history — it requires a qualifying higher price to have been in effect for part of the preceding 90-day window, so a seller who wants a "was $X, now $Y" badge has to have actually charged something close to $X during that window before dropping to $Y.
Sellers engineer this via Seller Central's pricing fields (list price vs. sale price, scheduled promotions, coupons) rather than by setting an arbitrary "was" price — Amazon suppresses the badge if the price history doesn't qualify.
The green coupon badge requires the shopper to actively tick a redemption box at checkout. Many forget to: "This is actually a great gimmick since a lot of shoppers will forget to actually tick the box, and you end up making a sale at full price." Set a per-customer redemption cap (Advertising > Coupons) to prevent the coupon from clearing inventory at a loss.
Amazon shows a strikethrough "typical price" only when Your Price is set below the median price actually paid over the trailing 90 days (limited-time promo prices are excluded from that median). Practical implication: keep the list/"Your Price" relatively high to build a qualifying price history, then run time-limited deals to trigger the strikethrough display against that history.
The tactic of keeping List Price/"Your Price" elevated and discounting only via time-limited deals isn't just about a bigger-looking percent-off — it's about preserving the 90-day sales-history-at-that-price Amazon requires before it will legitimately award a strikethrough "typical price" badge. Dropping the base price outright would reset that qualifying history.