How We Verify Deals

Every listing on this site has to clear one bar: 50% off or more, or it doesn't make the page. This page explains exactly how we check that, what we track after a deal goes live, and — just as importantly — what we deliberately don't claim, because we can't back it up.

What "50% off" means here

The discount shown is calculated against the price the retailer itself lists as the original or list price at the moment we find the listing. If a listing doesn't clear 50% off against that number, it never enters our system in the first place — there's no separate approval step where a below-threshold item almost makes the page. The filter runs before storage, not after.

What happens after a deal goes live

Once a listing clears the 50% bar, we start keeping our own price history for it: every time our hourly check sees that listing again, we record whatever price it's showing at that moment. That log is entirely our own observation, built one hourly check at a time, not something the retailer hands us.

That history is what lets us flag when a price keeps falling after we started watching it — a real, measured drop from the highest price we ourselves ever recorded for that listing, not a comparison to what the retailer originally claimed.

What we deliberately don't claim

We only start recording a listing's price after it has already cleared the 50% filter. That means our own price history can never confirm or deny whether the retailer's stated original price was ever real — we simply never observed the listing before the discount was already applied. Comparing our history against a number we never actually saw would flag nearly everything as suspicious for a reason that has nothing to do with whether it's genuinely inflated, so we don't publish that comparison. Anyone claiming otherwise from a similar setup is measuring an artifact, not a fact.

When a deal comes down

A listing stays on the site while it has been re-confirmed at the retailer within the last 6 hours. Past that we can no longer vouch that it is still there, so it comes off — whether that's because it's no longer live at the retailer, or because the price moved back above the 50% line. Nothing here is manually curated for how long it stays up — the same hourly check that finds new deals is what retires old ones.

Where listings come from

eBay listings come in through eBay's official Browse API. Walmart listings come from Walmart's public deals feed. The Amazon Picks section works differently and is explained on its own page and in About — those are hand-picked, not pulled by the automated scanner.

How often this runs

The scanner runs hourly. A listing you see on the page is, at most, an hour out of date with what the retailer is actually showing right now — whatever the retailer's checkout page says at the moment you buy is always what applies.