How we check every deal
Every other deal site repeats the percentage Amazon prints on the listing. That number is measured against a list price the seller chooses, which is why a product can be “70% off” and still cost what it always costs. This page describes exactly what we do instead, and what we refuse to publish.
1. We keep our own price record
Every time we re-request a product from Amazon we store the price we were quoted. Once a product has at least four recorded points we can say what it typically costs, what the cheapest price we have ever seen is, and therefore how much of the advertised discount is real. That measured figure is what we call the real drop, and it is what our listings sort by.
When the advertised discount and the measured drop disagree by a wide margin, the deal page says so in plain language and the deal is pushed down the rankings rather than featured. We would rather show you fewer deals than repeat a number we cannot support.
2. Deals are rechecked on their own schedule
A deal is not re-fetched simply because it exists. Each one carries its own next-check time: offers close to their published end time, popular offers and live Amazon deal events come back within the hour, while settled listings that have not moved in several checks drift out to a few hours. Anything we cannot successfully recheck within our freshness window is retired rather than shown with a price we can no longer stand behind.
Separately, any deal whose published Amazon end time passes is removed within about two minutes, without waiting for the next scheduled sweep.
3. The shipping filter
This is the check most deal sites skip, because the product API returns the item price and not the delivery charge. That gap is where the classic trap lives: an item listed at a couple of dollars, with a delivery charge many times larger, which you only discover at checkout.
So the main catalog carries only offers where delivery cost cannot ambush you: Prime-exclusive and Prime early-access offers, and offers sold by Amazon itself. Third-party featured offers, and non-Prime offers priced below Amazon's free-delivery threshold, are kept out. Shipping cost and delivery date are still finalised by Amazon at checkout — we are removing the offers where that number is most likely to surprise you, not promising what it will be.
4. Discounts that cannot be real
A was-price many times the selling price is a marketing number rather than a saving. Offers with an implausible discount, or a savings basis far above anything we have ever recorded for the product, do not enter the catalog at all.
5. What we earn
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Links to Amazon are paid links, and a qualifying purchase earns a commission at no extra cost to you. That is precisely why all of the above is automated and rule-based rather than left to judgement: the checks run the same way whether or not a deal would be profitable to feature.