This page sets out exactly where our numbers come from and what they mean, so you can decide how much to trust them.
Where the prices come from
Retailers publish a machine-readable file listing their whole catalogue — names, prices, sizes, stock, links — and refresh it roughly once a day. We download those files each morning through the affiliate networks the retailers themselves use.
A feed is a day old at worst, and discounts can move in hours. So before we show you the cheapest offer on a page, we check that one against the retailer’s live product page. Everything else is labelled with when it was last seen.
What a price actually includes
The figure we rank by is what lands on your doormat: the item, plus delivery, plus any import duty and VAT where the shop ships from outside the UK and does not cover them.
Duty is an estimate and we label it as one. UK rates on clothing vary by the exact commodity, and couriers charge their own clearance fee on top. We would rather show a slightly high estimate, clearly marked, than a clean number that turns out to be wrong at the door.
How we decide something is reduced
We keep every price we have ever recorded for a piece. “Usual” means the middle value of all of them over the last year — the median, not the average, so one long clearance cannot drag it down.
- Lowest ever — cheaper than at any point we have recorded.
- Below usual — at least 10% under its own median.
- Slightly reduced — under its median, but not by much.
- Nothing — most of the time. If a piece is at its normal price we say nothing rather than inventing a reason to shout.
Below thirty days of history we show no verdict at all. With three weeks of readings a median is not a median, and a confident badge built on it would be worse than silence.
What we do not know
- Prices between our daily readings. A flash sale that opens and closes inside a day can pass us entirely.
- Stock at a shop we do not carry. We compare the stockists we track, not the whole internet.
- Whether a shop will honour a price. We link you to them; the transaction is theirs.
Affiliate links
Links to stockists are affiliate links. If you buy, the shop pays us a commission at no cost to you. It does not affect the price you are quoted, and it does not affect the order offers are listed in — cheapest first, every time, whatever the commission.
Found something wrong? Tell us and we will fix it. Accuracy is the only thing this site has.