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 compare it to what we watched the store charge.
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 product. This is the strongest thing we'll claim, and we only claim it against our own history — a product we started tracking last week has a short history, and we say when tracking started.
- 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 comes down when the price goes back up, so links to expired deals will stop working.
Where we stand
We're independent of the stores listed here. No store pays for placement, and ranking is decided by the size of the fall and how well we can evidence it — 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.