How to tell a real price drop from a fake one

A big “was” price next to a red number is not proof of a deal. A real drop means the same item, from the same seller, now costs less than it recently did.

Quick checks before you buy

• Compare with the item’s own recent price, not with the “was” or list price printed beside it. A reference price can be one the item rarely or never sold at.
• Be wary of a discount that never ends. If a product is “40% off” every time you look, the “was” price is probably inflated.
• Check the total. Shipping, taxes and fees can cancel out a lower headline price.
• Make sure it is the same thing: the same variant (size, color, storage), condition (new, refurbished, used) and seller. Marketplace pages often mix several sellers.
• Check the currency. A page that switches from USD to EUR, or to another region’s store, can show a smaller number without being cheaper.
• Read ranges carefully. “$19.99 – $29.99” usually means only some variants cost the low number.

What Bargains counts as a drop

Bargains only compares the page you gave it with its own earlier prices. It reads the price from the product page HTML: JSON-LD Offer data, product or Open Graph price meta (such as og:price), or itemprop price microdata. The first successful fetch is a baseline. A drop is logged only when a later fetch parses a lower price than the last one stored, and at or below your target if you set one.

What we ignore on purpose

• Error pages. If the shop answers with an HTTP error (for example 403, 404, 429 or 5xx), we record the error and ignore any number on that page.
• Zero and “ask for price”. A price of 0 is treated as sold out or price on request, never as a drop.
• Currency switches. If the page’s currency changes, we start a new baseline in the new currency instead of alerting.
• Ranges. For “$19.99 – $29.99” we take the low end, 19.99, and never blend the numbers.

We do not use coupon feeds, and we do not show “was” prices we did not fetch ourselves. If we cannot read a price, the watch shows an error instead of a guess, so some shops (often bot-walled or JavaScript-only pages) cannot be watched.

Want a record of one item’s real price? Start a watch, browse the public drop log, or read the FAQ.