About the prices you see here

Why prices can differ from Amazon

Amazon prices move constantly — sometimes several times a day, driven by stock levels, sellers competing for the buy box, and promotions. This site is built as static pages, refreshed on a schedule rather than on every visit, so the figure you see was true when it was recorded and may not be true now.

That is why every price is printed with a “price checked” date beside it. If that date looks old, treat the number as indicative only.

After 7 days we stop showing the number

Judging “is that date old?” should not be your job, so past a certain age we do not print the figure at all. A price we have not been able to re-check for more than 7 days is replaced by “Price not shown”, still with the date we last checked it, and the link to Amazon stays exactly where it was — that link now goes to the only number that was ever authoritative.

The threshold is our own rule, not Amazon’s. Prices here are refreshed on a daily schedule, so 7 days without a successful refresh means the pipeline has been failing for a week rather than having an off day. Where a price is hidden, the structured data behind the page drops its offer too, so a search result cannot show you a figure this page is refusing to show.

One thing this does not hide: the sentences that describe a whole category — how many products we track, the range they span, the middle of that range. Those are statistics about the snapshot we hold rather than the current price of any one item, and every page carrying them also carries the date the snapshot was taken. Deliberately no worked example here with a figure in it: a made-up price on the page that explains our prices would be the one number on this site nobody could check.

What is authoritative

The price on amazon.co.uk at the moment you check out is the only price that matters. Nothing on this site forms part of any offer or contract. If the two disagree, Amazon is right and we are stale.

What we will not do

• We do not show struck-through “was” prices or percentage discounts. Reconstructing a reliable price history is not something we can do honestly, and a fake reference price is one of the most common dark patterns in this category.
• We do not claim anything is the “cheapest” or the “best price”. We can see one retailer, not the market.
• We do not use countdown timers or stock-scarcity counters to imply a price is about to change.

Found a wrong price?

Please let us know — include the product and what Amazon is actually showing. Reports like that are the fastest way we find out our data pipeline has gone stale for a category.