Price accuracy & methodology

Avahit shows prices for products sold by other companies, and it keeps a history of what those prices were. Both are useful only if you know exactly how they were produced. This page says so, including where the method has limits.

The disclaimer that matters most

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date and time indicated on each product page and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on the merchant’s site at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of that product.

Where our figure and the store’s disagree, the store is right. We are describing a shop window we do not own.

Where a price comes from

• When a product is added.We read the merchant’s own page and take the price, currency and availability it publishes.
• Afterwards. A background job re-checks the price once a day — every 24hours — from the merchant’s public product feed where they publish one, and from the product page otherwise.
• We ask for the US storefront explicitly. Our server sits in the EU, and stores show European visitors European prices. Requests carry a US market parameter so that a dollar figure is a dollar figure. This is not hypothetical: before we fixed it in August 2026, 224 products in our catalogue held pounds and euros labelled as dollars.
• Variants are tracked individually.A product with six sizes has six prices; we follow the one that was posted, not “the cheapest available”, because the cheapest changes as stock moves and would invent discounts that never happened.
• Currency mismatches are skipped, not converted. If a store answers in a currency other than the one recorded for a product, we discard that reading rather than guess an exchange rate.

What “last verified” means

Every product page shows the date we last successfully read a price for it in the expected currency. A failed attempt — store down, page changed, rate limit — does not update that date. If a store has been unreadable for a while, the date on the page will say so instead of quietly ageing.

Price history and “lowest we have seen”

The chart is built from our own observations, one point per check, and a point is written when the price changes or when a day has passed. That has two honest consequences:

• The line starts when we started watching, not when the product went on sale. Every chart shows that start date.
• “Lowest price we have seen” means exactly that: the lowest across our observations, with the number of observations shown next to it. It is not the lowest price in the product’s history, and we never phrase it that way.

When a price has never moved during our observations, we say that too, rather than presenting an unchanged price as a discovered low.

Was-price and discounts

A struck-through price appears only when we observed the higher price ourselves. We do not copy a merchant’s “RRP” or “compare at” figure, because those are marketing numbers that nobody was necessarily charged. A discount percentage is measured from the highest price we recently observed, so a slow slide from 100 to 78 registers as a real drop rather than four invisible ones.

Products sourced through a merchant API

Some programmes license price data on condition that it is not stored beyond a short window. For products from such programmes we display a price with a shorter freshness window, refresh it through the official API rather than by reading the page, and do not build a long-term history chart. That is a deliberate limitation, not an oversight.

What we do not include

Shipping, taxes, duties, member pricing, coupon codes and regional promotions are not in the figure you see here. They appear at the store’s checkout, which is another reason the store’s page is authoritative.

Found a wrong price?

Tell us: [email protected] with the product address. Prices we cannot verify are removed rather than left to rot, and a store that repeatedly serves us unreadable data gets dropped from the catalogue.

How products are chosen and ordered in the first place is a separate question, answered on how we pick and rank. Who earns what when you buy is on the affiliate disclosure.