How we check prices

Kelpie Deals is an independent Australian price tracker. This page sets out where our prices come from, how often we check them, and the exact rules behind every deal and every "low price" label, so you can judge them for yourself.

Last reviewed 4 November 2026. Times on this site are Sydney time.

Which retailers we check

We check 12 Australian retailers. We add a store when its prices are public and its robots.txt lets us read them. If a store blocks honest crawlers, we leave it out; we don't try to get around bot protection.

Some retailers, such as Myer, also list items sold by third-party sellers. We record the price the retailer's page shows and don't separate the seller out. Matching products across stores uses barcodes and model numbers only, never a guess from the title.

How we collect prices

Our bot, KelpieDealsBot, reads each store's public category pages, product pages and product sitemaps. It checks every address against the store's robots.txt first, identifies itself honestly, and keeps to a gentle pace. It never logs in or solves CAPTCHAs.

How often:

• We sweep each store's category listings every 30 minutes. That finds new products and refreshes the price of everything on them. A few stores have no usable category pages, so we read their product sitemaps instead (a full pass every 12 hours) and check each product on its own page.
• Products that changed price in the last 48 hours, were first seen in the last 72 hours or were clicked in the last 48 hours are refreshed at least every 50 minutes.
• Every other product is refreshed at least every 5 hours.
• During Black Friday to Cyber Monday (20 November to 2 December), every product is checked at the faster rate.

A price counts as current only if we confirmed it in the last 6 hours. Older prices are still shown, clearly marked, with the time we last checked them. If a store goes quiet or blocks us, its prices go stale rather than being guessed.

A product is removed only after it has been missing from 3 category passes in a row and its own page has also come back gone 2 times. A single bad read never removes anything.

What a price means

Prices are in AUD, include GST and exclude shipping. Delivery, click and collect, coupon codes, memberships and trade-ins are not included. We record the price any shopper sees on the product page.

• Condition: new, refurbished and open-box stock are tracked separately, and we never compare one with another.
• Best price: the cheapest in-stock new price, confirmed in the last 6 hours.
• Price history: we write a new record whenever a store's price, was-price or stock changes. History is never trimmed or edited, so what you see is what happened.
• Was-prices: a store's own "was" price is shown as the store's claim, not ours. We ignore one that is at or below the current price.

What counts as a deal

A deal appears only when one of three rules fires. All three need the item in stock, at least two observations of the listing, and a like-for-like comparison (new with new, refurbished with refurbished).

• Price drop: the price is at least 15% below what the same listing cost 7 days ago. For a listing we have watched for less time, the comparison is its first recorded price, once that is at least 48 hours old.
• Cheaper than other stores: the price is at least 10% below the cheapest other store, among prices checked in the last 6 hours, and it did not just go up.
• Was-price check: a store shows a was-price at least 5% above the lowest price we recorded in the 30 days before the current price, and the price went up during that time. We need at least 48 hours of our own records first, and we say nothing when the item really sold at the was-price for most of that time. We show our figures next to the store's claim and leave the judgement to you. It is information, not an accusation.

The same deal is not repeated for 72 hours unless the price falls a further 3%. A deal ends when the item sells out, the price rises, or the rule no longer holds, and ended deals stay visible, labelled as ended. Tags such as all-time low (the lowest price we have recorded for that product and condition) and cheapest now (at or below every other store checked recently) add context but never create a deal.

Is this a low price?

Product pages say whether today's best price is low, typical or high. Once a day, we take the cheapest in-stock new price across all stores. Over the last 90 days that gives a list of daily best prices.

• Low: today's price is at or below the 25th percentile of those daily prices, the cheapest quarter of days.
• High: today's price is above the 75th percentile, the dearest quarter of days.
• Typical: anything in between.

We need at least 14 days of daily prices before we give a verdict, and a price that has stayed the same is not called low. For newer products we say we don't have enough history yet, rather than guess.

Our honesty rules

• Every price shows when we last checked it.
• We call something a discount only against a price we recorded, and we show that price.
• We never write "fake sale". A was-price check uses neutral wording and our own numbers.
• We don't fill gaps with estimates, and we don't show a verdict we can't back with data.
• No retailer pays to be listed, featured or ranked, and no one can buy a deal's place in the feed.

Independence and affiliate links

Kelpie Deals is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any retailer on this page. Links to stores go through our site so we can count clicks; they carry no affiliate tag, and we are paid nothing when you buy. If that ever changes, we will say so here and next to the links before it does, and it won't change which deals we list or how we rank them.

Report a mistake

Prices come from automated reads of public pages, so occasionally one is wrong or out of date. If you spot one, email hello@kelpiedeals.com.au with a link to the product page and what the store shows. We check it against our records, fix the cause where we can, and reply. The store's own page is always the final word on price and stock.

Related: About Kelpie Deals, KelpieDealsBot, Privacy.