207,881 products 423 shops read 186 min ago

How this works

Every number on this page is read from the database as the page is built. None of them is written by hand.

What we read

We read the public catalogue of 423 shops every night, one request every 3.5 seconds, and record the price of every variant they list. That is 886,254 variants grouped into 207,881 products, across 23 countries and 12 currencies.

The last sweep finished 186 min ago. We have been recording since August 27, 20267 days of price history so far.

We do not scrape pages. Every shop here publishes its catalogue in a machine readable form of its own accord, and we read that.

How a price becomes a verdict

A product is not a listing. The same board sold by six shops is one product with six offers, matched on the normalised title and verified on the URL — a path is written by each merchant independently, so when six of them write the same thing, that agreement is evidence rather than a tautology.

Every product then carries exactly one verdict, in this order:

  • Real deal — cheapest of several independent shops, or a genuine discount no competitor beats. 2,596 today.
  • Dropped today — the price fell between our last two readings of that shop. 2,772 today.
  • New low — it came down to a price we had never measured, and is still there. 261 today.
  • Seen lower — we watched it cheaper than it is now. 1,719.
  • Best of N shops / Same price at N — several shops carry it. 5,290 and 2,472.
  • Only listing — none of the 423 shops we read sells it anywhere else. 200,119, which is 96.3% of everything we track.

Only 7,762 products — 3.7% — are carried by two or more independent shops. Of those, 5,290 show a real price gap and 2,472 are the same price everywhere. We say so on both: an enforced price is information too.

What we refuse to say

  • We never call a price the lowest we have seen until a full sweep has passed since we first read it. One reading proves nothing; two prove stability.
  • We never convert currencies. Offers are compared inside one currency, never across. A converted comparison is a guess about a rate, not a measurement.
  • We show the country a shop ships from. We do not know where it ships to, so we do not say.
  • A crossed out price is only shown when a competitor genuinely charges it today. A discount a shop announces against itself is not a discount.
  • Products we cannot compare are published anyway, and labelled as such. Hiding them would hide the one thing we are in a position to state.

How we are paid

Outgoing links pass through /go/ so we can count them, and some of them will carry an affiliate tag once a programme is signed. 2,076 of the products we compare have at least one merchant with a publicly announced programme.

No merchant pays for placement, and no verdict changes because of it. The order of a list is the order of the measurement.

The data

The measurements are published under CC BY 4.0. Take them, cite the source. What is available and how to get it →