How we verify a deal
A discount is only worth knowing about if the old price was real. Most "sale" pages compare today's price to a number the store chose. We verify two ways: when our own history shows the price falling, we call it an observed drop; when only the store's compare-at supports it, we label it as the store's claim. Both are reported, but we never pass one off as the other.
We keep our own record
Once a day we read the published catalogue of each Australian store we track and write down what every product costs. Do that for a while and you have a price history — which is the only way to tell a genuine markdown from a price that has quietly sat at "40% off" since March. The history is ours; it isn't supplied by the stores.
Why we don't trust a "was" price on its own
Online stores publish a compare-at price next to the selling price. Nothing stops that number being aspirational, and on some catalogues every single product carries one permanently. We record it, but on its own it isn't evidence, and we rank those deals below the ones we watched fall.
The three things we say
- Lowest we've seen
- The price matches the cheapest we have ever recorded for that retailer listing. This is the strongest thing we'll claim, and we only claim it against our own history — a listing we started tracking last week has a short history, and we say when tracking started. Canonical product pages combine the histories of their linked listings and state that broader scope separately.
- Price dropped
- We recorded a higher price, then recorded a lower one. The "was" figure is a price we actually saw, on a date we can name.
- Store markdown
- The store says it's reduced and we haven't seen the higher price ourselves yet. We label these as the store's claim rather than ours, and they rank last.
What we can't see
We read published online catalogue prices. That leaves things out: in-store and member-only pricing, checkout discounts, prices that need an account, and stores that block automated readers altogether. Delivery costs aren't in any figure on this site. A deal expires when the price goes back up — the product page stays live with its full history intact.
Affiliate links
Some outbound links earn us a commission — we're a participant in affiliate programs like Commission Factory. It never changes the price you pay, and it never changes how we rank offers: order is decided by evidence strength, the size of the saving, freshness and availability. Products that enter the catalogue through a merchant feed rather than our own crawl are labelled as such on their page, and a feed price is presented with the freshness the merchant's feed actually has.
Where we stand
We're independent of the stores listed here. No store pays for placement, and ranking is decided by evidence strength, the size of the saving, freshness and availability — nothing else. We don't sell anything ourselves and we don't handle your order; the buy link takes you to the store's own page, where the price on the day is the one that counts.