A price is good when it is below what the product actually sells for day to day. Not below the recommended retail price, and not below a "was" figure on the page. To judge that you need the product's own history, so we record one every day: the lowest price across the stores we track, dated, with the store named.
What we record, and when
Once a day, for every product on this site, we save the cheapest live price at each retailer we compare. Each row keeps the price, the currency, the store and the moment it was observed. Nothing is estimated, and we never interpolate a price for a day we did not observe.
That gives three figures on each product page:
| Figure | What it means | What it does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest recorded | The cheapest daily price we have seen, with its date and store | Not the cheapest price ever offered anywhere |
| Usual price | The median of the daily lows in our window | Not an average, which one outlier can drag |
| Latest | The most recent daily low, with its date | Not a live price; the retailer's checkout is final |
We use the median rather than the mean on purpose. A single mispriced listing, or one day of a flash sale, moves an average enough to make an ordinary price look like a bargain. The median sits at the middle of what the product normally costs.
Why we say "the 4 days we have recorded" instead of "90 days"
Because that is what we have. This site began recording on 10 September 2026, so a product page today reports a window of days, not months, and says so in those words. As the record grows the window grows with it, and the wording changes to match. When a page says "lowest in the last 90 days", it will mean ninety days of observations exist.
Sites that show a "lowest in 90 days" badge from the first day of tracking are either buying the history or guessing at it. Ours is checkable: the figure has a date next to it, and the date is inside the window we claim.
How to judge a price in two minutes
- Compare today's price with the usual price, not with the RRP. If they are the same, this is simply the price.
- Look at how far the lowest recorded sits below the usual price. A gap of a few percent means the product barely moves; a gap of thirty percent means it goes on sale properly, and it is worth waiting.
- Check the date on the lowest. A low from four months ago tells you the product can reach that price. A low from yesterday tells you it is there now.
- Check the store attached to each figure. The cheapest price and the store you want to buy from are not always the same, and shipping or returns may be worth the difference.
- Look at the calendar. If a sale event is weeks away, an ordinary price today is usually worth waiting out. Our sales events guides cover the dates.
Does a longer history make the judgement better?
Up to a point. Ninety days spans one seasonal cycle for most electronics and captures a single major sale event, which is enough to tell an everyday price from a genuine cut. A year of history adds the launch-price effect, which matters for phones and televisions where the previous model is cut hard when a new one lands.
What a longer history does not fix is a product with only one seller. If every observation comes from the same store, the history describes that store's pricing rather than the market's. Where that happens, the product page shows how many stores were compared beside the price.
Where the numbers come from
The prices are gathered from retailer listings by our own tooling and recorded against the store that quoted them. Only retailers on our comparison list are recorded, because a history of prices we would never show you cannot support a claim we make on the page. Offers in another currency, and offers far below the rest for a product, are excluded before anything is recorded, for the reasons set out in our price comparison explainer.
Frequently asked questions
Is "lowest recorded" the lowest price ever? No. It is the lowest we have observed since we started recording this product, and the page says how long that is. The product may have been cheaper before we began.
Why does the product page sometimes show no history? Because we hold fewer than two days of observations for it. We would rather show nothing than draw a trend from one point.
Why is there no chart on some products? A line needs several points to mean anything. The chart appears once we hold at least five days of observations; below that the figures stand on their own.
Do you use price history from a third party? No. Every figure on our product pages comes from our own dated observations. Third-party history is often unattributed and cannot be checked against a store and a date.
Does a low price mean I should buy now? It means the price is good against its own history. Whether to buy also depends on whether a sale event is close and whether the product is about to be replaced by a new model.
This guide may contain affiliate links. See our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.