How we track prices

Prices enter the system only through channels the merchant has authorized: affiliate-network product feeds, official merchant APIs and structured storefront endpoints, and merchant-provided files. We never scrape a retailer's website, and community-submitted deals are reviewed by a moderator before publication.

Every listing stores which source it came from and when that source last ran, so a stale price can always be traced to the import that produced it.

Imports run hourly. Each pass re-reads every active source, updates prices and availability, and retires listings the feed no longer carries. Every price on the site carries a last-checked timestamp, and the retailer's checkout price always governs; we show the last price we observed, never a promise.

A price-history point is written whenever an observed price changes. When we chart that history, days without an observation are drawn as gaps, never interpolated: a chart on this site shows what we saw, not what we guessed. "Lowest" always means lowest within the stated tracking window for that bottle size, and the window is printed next to the claim. We never write "lowest ever".

A markdown is only displayed when a plausible reference price exists for that exact bottle and size, never a different size and never an invented list price. Discounts implying more than 75% off are rejected as likely feed errors rather than billed as bargains, and curated surfaces additionally require the fragrance to be carried by at least two sellers, so the discount has a second price to be checked against.

Headline prices favour full bottles of 30 ml and up, so a $5 sample vial never poses as the price of a fragrance. Underneath, every offer is normalized to price per millilitre, which is the only way a 50 ml and a 100 ml bottle can be compared honestly. The price-per-ml page shows this measure across the catalog.

The discounter ranking compares stores bottle for bottle: for every product a store shares with at least one other seller, its price is compared with the median of the other sellers, and the store's score is the median of those ratios across its whole shared catalog. A store needs at least 25 shared bottles to appear, so no ranking rests on a handful of listings.

No invented urgency: countdowns appear only when the merchant states a real end date. No fabricated reviews or star ratings; the site carries no review feature, so it publishes no aggregate rating markup. No asserted superlatives: a claim like "cheapest" appears only where the stored data computes it. And no scraped data, whatever it would add to coverage.

The site is funded by affiliate commissions, disclosed sitewide and next to every outbound link. Commissions never affect organic ranking, and the price you pay is identical either way; the full disclosure explains how that separation works.

Fragrance pages update hourly, so quote them with the observation date shown on the page. For point-in-time records, the weekly drop reports are frozen when their week closes and never change, which makes a dated permalink safe to cite. Questions about the method are welcome at support@dailyfragrancescout.com.