How we rank

This page explains, in plain terms, what decides the order you see things in on lowerSpendings, and when we put a label such as "Lowest price in 90 days" on a product.

In short

Nobody can pay for a better place. There are no sponsored or promoted listings.
Many stores pay us a commission when you buy through our links. Whether a store pays us, or how much, is not part of any ranking. Stores that pay us nothing are ranked by exactly the same rules (see Stores we compare).
Every deal label comes from prices we've seen ourselves. We don't repeat a store's "RRP" or "was" price.

Search

When you search, products are ordered by how well their names match what you typed. A product sold by several stores appears once, not once per store.

Category pages: "Popular"

A category page starts with the products that are most useful to compare:

Products sold by more stores come first: four or more stores, then three, then two, then products from one store.
Well-known brands for that kind of product lead within each group. "Well-known" is worked out for each category from how many of its stores and products carry the brand, so phone brands lead on phones and cable makers on cables.
Products we're unsure about (where our system isn't confident the product belongs in the category) go lower.
A good current price breaks ties.

Near the top we also spread things out: among the first 24 products, no more than three in each row of 12 come from one store, or from one brand, unless there's nothing else close to them.

The home page

The home page shows price drops and products from a mix of categories. If you've used the site before, it's personalised from what you've viewed, liked or set alerts on (see our Privacy Policy). Each row is limited to a few products per store and per brand, so no single store can fill it.

A product's stores

On a product's page, the stores selling it are listed cheapest first. Each one says when we last checked it. An offer we haven't seen for a week more than the others goes to the bottom with the day we last saw it, and neither it nor a price the store hasn't updated for two weeks gets the "Cheapest" label.

What the labels mean

We record a product's price every day we see it. The labels below are worked out from that history, and only shown when the history supports them.

↓20% (with a crossed-out price): The price fell by at least 5% in the last 30 days, and we saw the earlier price on at least 7 days before it fell. A price that lasted only a day or two doesn't count as a "was" price.
Lowest price in 30, 60 or 90 days: Today's price is the lowest we've seen in that period, and the price has been higher in it.
Lowest price since we started tracking: For products we've tracked for under 30 days: today's price is below every price we've seen, after at least a week of tracking. It shows the date we started.
N% below its usual price: Today's price is at least 10% below its usual price: the middle of its prices over the last 90 days, weighted by how long each one lasted. It needs at least 30 days of history.
Price last updated N days ago: The store hasn't updated this price in its feed for over two weeks, so it may have changed. These prices get no deal labels, and after five weeks we stop showing them.

A drop of more than 80% is almost always a mistake in a store's feed, so it never gets a label. The labels describe what we've seen, not every price a product has ever had.

For the curious

More detail on how "Popular" scores a product

Each product gets points: 9 if four or more stores sell it, 8 for three, 7 for two; 2 more if one store sells it in three or more sizes, colours or conditions; up to 4 for its brand; 2 if its category is confident; and up to 3 for how typical its kind of product is for the page (an interest weight we set per category, higher for phones than for phone cases). In low-interest categories part of the store points shrinks too, so a spare part sold by two stores doesn't lead a page.
A brand's points depend on how many of the category's stores sell it and how many of its products it has. We can also choose a brand to lead a category by hand. None are set today, and it is never done for payment.
Our current price score is added as a tie-breaker worth less than one point, so it never beats a store or brand step.
When many shoppers choose "Not interested" for a product or a store, it can lose up to one point for everyone. Those counts are anonymous (see our Privacy Policy).
The spread-out step only moves a product up past better-scoring ones if it's within 2 points of the best remaining product.

Where the home page's deals come from

Deal rows score each price on its drop (bigger and more recent is better, halving in value every 7 days, capped at 50% because bigger drops are more often errors), whether it's the lowest in 30, 60 or 90 days, and how far it is below its usual price. Rows are spread across price ranges, so a row isn't all $10 items or all $500 ones, and each row allows only a couple of products per store.

What doesn't affect ranking

Whether a store pays us commission, the commission rate, or which affiliate network it uses.
Ads: they're shown by Google, separately from our results.
Who you are. Apart from the home page's personalisation and anything you've marked "Not interested", everyone sees the same search results, category pages and prices.

Spotted something that looks wrong? Please tell us; the contact details are in our Terms. You can also read How we make money and how we decide what you see.