Research · discounter price index · edition 1 · data as of August 12, 2026
We ranked five fragrance discounters by measured price level. Even the cheapest loses 58.3% of individual price checks.
This is the first monthly edition of our discounter price index. On August 12, 2026 we snapshotted 29,021 live prices across 9,227 fragrances and 5 online discounters, isolated the 319 bottles carried by at least two of them at the same size, and measured who actually charges what for identical products.
Two findings frame everything below. Stores that look interchangeable are 42 percentage points apart on the same bottles. And the store that wins that ranking still does not hold the lowest price on most individual bottles, which is the entire argument for comparing before buying rather than trusting any one shop.
Finding 1: the index
Same bottles, 42 points apart
For every bottle a store shares with at least one other seller, we compare its price against the median of the other sellers, then take the median of those ratios across the store's shared catalog. Negative is cheaper than the market, positive is dearer.
Olfactory Factory prices a median 17% below the shared-bottle market; Perfumania prices 25% above it. The live version of this ranking recomputes hourly at cheapest fragrance discounters.
Finding 2: nobody wins everything
The cheapest store holds the lowest price on only 41.7% of bottles
Across the 319 shared bottles, here is how often each store held the single lowest live price:
| Store | Index position | Cheapest-seller share |
|---|---|---|
| Olfactory Factory | #1 | 41.7% |
| Venba Fragrance | #2 | 30.7% |
| FragranceNet | #3 | 22.3% |
| Intense Oud | #4 | 1.3% |
| Perfumania | #5 | 4.1% |
Read those two columns together: the overall ranking is real, and it still misleads anyone who shops by it alone. Olfactory Factory is the cheapest store on average and loses 58.3% of individual bottles to somebody else. A store-level habit saves money on average; a per-bottle comparison saves money every time.
Finding 3: the spread on identical bottles
Half of shared bottles spread more than 20% between sellers
On the same sealed bottle at the same size, the median spread between the cheapest and priciest seller is 20.2%. 50.2% of shared bottles spread more than 20%, and 8.2% spread more than 50%. In dollars: a median gap of $38.96, a 90th-percentile gap of $128.00, and a maximum of $340.01 on a single bottle.
- Mancera Instant Crush, 120 ml: $72.00 to $200.00 across 3 sellers on the snapshot day.
- Xerjoff Accento, 100 ml: $119.99 to $330.00 across 3 sellers on the snapshot day.
- Creed Royal Princess Oud, 75 ml: $159.99 to $335.99 across 3 sellers on the snapshot day.
Method and honesty notes
How this was measured, and what it cannot say
Prices come from the retailers' authorized data feeds, re-checked hourly; nothing is scraped. The shared-bottle pool requires full bottles of 30 ml and up priced at $50 or more, in stock, at the identical size from at least two sellers, and gaps implying more than a 4x ratio are excluded as probable data faults rather than billed as findings. Sold-out listings never count as a price.
What this cannot say: whether any seller's stock, shipping, or service justifies its premium, and anything about months we did not observe. Our price history is young; where a claim rests on a window, the window is printed next to it across the site. The full methodology lives at how we track prices.
Reusing these numbers is welcome and free with attribution and the date. This edition is frozen; the live ranking is at cheapest fragrance discounters and the machine-readable index at /data. Edition 2 arrives in September as a new dated page.
We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this site. The affiliate relationships play no role in the measurements above; the method is identical for every store and published in full.