How we decide whether a discount is real

A crossed-out price is a claim about the past: this used to cost more. It is also the easiest thing on a deals site to get wrong, because the earlier price usually arrives from the same place as the current one, and nobody checks it.

We would rather show you less than show you something we cannot support. This is what that means in practice.

The rule

We show a discount only where we hold an earlier price we can stand behind. Where we do not, we show the current price and nothing else. No crossed-out figure, no percentage, no "was" line.

That applies to the deal title as well. Older listings in our catalogue have a discount claim baked into the title text itself, along the lines of "Headphones - 27% OFF". Where we cannot support that claim, it is stripped out of the title before the page is rendered, so it cannot survive as a leftover piece of text after the crossed-out price has already been removed.

What it costs

When we analysed our five-year history, 72.3% of the 24,130 deals carried both a price and an earlier price that survived checking. The other 27.7% did not, and they are concentrated in the platform's earliest years.

Those were excluded rather than estimated. An excluded deal still appears on the site; it simply appears without a discount. That is a little over a quarter of our history showing a plain price where a percentage would look better.

What gets thrown out

Two checks do most of the work.

An earlier price that is not higher. If the recorded earlier price is the same as or below the current price, the pair is a data error rather than a discount, and it is dropped instead of being shown as 0% off.

Discounts above 95%. A genuine 97% discount is vanishingly rare. A bad scrape that produces one is not. We treat anything that extreme as a fault rather than a find.

Why publish this at all

Because it is checkable. Open an older listing on this site and you will find a price and no percentage next to it. That is the rule doing its job, and it is easier to point at than to describe.

It is also the honest answer to a fair question about any deals site: what stops you inflating the "was" price? For us, the answer is that we mostly do not have one, and where we do not, we say nothing.

Figures come from an analysis of our own deal history: 24,130 deals posted between 2021 and 2026, of which 72.3% carried a price and an earlier price we could compare. The analysis was last run on 13 August 2026.