Research · discounter price index · edition 2 · data as of September 4, 2026
Seven fragrance discounters, 539 identical bottles. The cheapest store on average is no longer the store that wins the most price checks.
Published Sep 4, 2026 · By Daily Fragrance Scout
This is the second monthly edition of our discounter price index. On September 4, 2026 we took 10,372 in-stock prices across 7,097 fragrances and 7 online discounters, isolated the 539 full bottles carried by at least two of them at the same size, and measured who charges what for identical products. Two stores joined the pool since August: Maple Prime and eCosmetics. The shared-bottle pool grew from 319 to 539.
Three findings. Olfactory Factory is the cheapest store on average, 22% below the market on the bottles it shares, but Venba Fragrance holds the single lowest price on more individual bottles. The gap between the cheapest and dearest store on identical products doubled to 85 points. And more than a quarter of shared bottles now spread over 50% between sellers, up from 8.2% in August.
Finding 1: the index
Same bottles, 85 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. Only stores measured over at least 25 shared bottles are ranked.
Olfactory Factory prices a median 22% below the shared-bottle market; Intense Oud prices 63% above it. Intense Oud's position moved the most since August (+20% then): the bottles it shares are now mostly niche and Middle-Eastern houses that Olfactory Factory, Venba and the newly tracked Maple Prime undercut heavily, so the same store measured against a different market reads far dearer. The live version of this ranking recomputes hourly at cheapest fragrance discounters.
Finding 2: average price and win rate disagree
Olfactory Factory is cheapest on average; Venba Fragrance wins the most bottles
Across the 539 shared bottles, how often each store held the single lowest live price, next to its August figure:
| Store | Index (Sep) | Index (Aug) | Cheapest-seller share (Sep) | Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Olfactory Factory | -22% | -17% | 26.5% | 41.7% |
| Venba Fragrance | -15% | -4% | 29.5% | 30.7% |
| FragranceNet | +1% | -3% | 24.3% | 22.3% |
| Maple Prime | +5% | new | 12.6% | - |
| eCosmetics | +7% | new | 1.7% | - |
| Perfumania | +22% | +25% | 3.5% | 4.1% |
| Intense Oud | +63% | +20% | 1.1% | 1.3% |
In August the cheapest store also won the most bottles (41.7%). In September the two titles split: Olfactory Factory is 22% below market and holds the lowest price on 26.5% of bottles, losing 73.5% of individual price checks; Venba Fragrance, 15% below market, wins 29.5%. Two more sellers in the pool means more bottles where somebody else is a few dollars lower. A store-level habit still saves money on average; a per-bottle comparison saves it every time, and the margin between the two has widened.
Finding 3: the spread on identical bottles
27.5% of shared bottles spread more than 50% between sellers
On the same sealed bottle at the same size, the median spread between the cheapest and priciest seller is 26.4% (August: 20.2%). 59% of shared bottles spread more than 20%, and 27.5% spread more than 50% (August: 8.2%). In dollars: a median gap of $31.95, a 90th-percentile gap of $135.01, and a maximum of $325.00 on a single bottle. The dollar median fell while the percentage median rose: the new sellers added many mid-priced bottles where a $30 gap is a 40% gap.
- Boadicea the Victorious Blue Sapphire Supercharged, 100 ml: $619.99 to $944.99 across 2 sellers on the snapshot day.
- Parfums de Marly Carios, 100 ml: $239.99 to $542.19 across 4 sellers on the snapshot day.
- Boadicea the Victorious Blue Sapphire, 100 ml: $399.99 to $678.99 across 2 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, checked around the clock; nothing is scraped. The shared-bottle pool requires full bottles (boxed, unboxed or tester; no decants, minis or sets) of 30 ml and up priced at $50 or more, in stock, at the identical size from at least two sellers; the cheapest offer per store counts once. Gaps implying more than a 4x ratio are excluded as probable data faults; this month none needed excluding. Sold-out listings never count as a price. The computation is a script in the site's repository, so any figure here can be re-derived for the snapshot date.
Totals are not comparable with August: since edition 1 the importer holds sold-out and placeholder-priced rows out of the live set, so this edition counts fewer, cleaner prices. The shared-bottle pool is built under identical rules and is comparable, with one caveat printed above: every store's index is measured against the other sellers on its bottles, so two new sellers move everyone's number, not only their own.
What this cannot say: whether any seller's stock, shipping, or service justifies its premium, and anything about days we did not observe. 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, the machine-readable index at /data, and edition 1 at August 2026. Edition 3 arrives in October as a new dated page.
We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this site. It never changes your price or how we rank offers. The affiliate relationships play no role in the measurements above; the method is identical for every store and published in full.