The default order
Offers are sorted in three steps.
- Can you buy it? Offers we checked recently come before offers we have not checked for over 24 hours. Then they are ordered by stock state, from in stock to sold out (see the table below).
- Price, lowest first: the shop's price for the item itself.
- Ties go to the shop's name, A to Z.
On a product page you can also sort by price with delivery. There, offers whose delivery cost we do not know come after every offer whose full price we do, so leaving delivery out never wins a shop the top place. Availability still comes first in every sort.
Price and delivery
The price we show is the shop's price for the item. Delivery costs differ from shop to shop and order to order, so they are not added to it. On each product page the table of shops shows every shop's standard delivery to your country and the total with delivery. Where a shop offers free delivery over a spend, we apply it when the item alone reaches the threshold. When we do not know a shop's delivery cost we say so.
Prices in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands include VAT, and prices in Australia and New Zealand include GST. US and Canadian prices exclude sales tax, which the shop adds at checkout. A shop that prices in another currency is converted at that day's European Central Bank rate, and a shop that ships from another country is marked, because duties or import VAT may apply.
Which shops we include
We only check shops whose terms allow it, and we follow each shop's robots.txt on every visit. A shop that blocks us is paused straight away and stays paused until it says otherwise. No shop pays to be listed. You can see every shop we watch, and when we last checked it, on the shops page for your country. How our crawler behaves is on the bot page.
Sealed cases are listed as their own products, never mixed into the offers for the box they contain, so a case price can never pass for a cheap single box.
Typical price and deals
We record the cheapest price every day. A product's typical price is the middle of its last 30 days of lows. We wait for 14 days of prices before we say anything about a product's price, so a new listing is never called a deal.
A deal is a product whose cheapest price today is at least 5% under its typical price. One unusual day cannot create a deal. On a product page we also compare today's price with the middle half of the last 90 days and with the RRP, and we always say when a price is still above the RRP.
Stock states
Every offer shows one of these, in this order.
| State | What it means | Can you order? |
|---|---|---|
| In stock | The shop says it has stock and you can order now. | Yes |
| Low stock | In stock, but the shop shows only a few left. | Yes |
| Pre-order | You can order now and the shop sends it on release. | Yes |
| Back-order | You can order now; the shop is waiting for more stock. | Yes |
| Invite only | Only open to customers the shop invites, so most people cannot buy it. | No |
| Stock not known | The shop does not say whether it has stock. | No |
| Sold out | The shop has none to sell. | No |
Freshness
Every price shows when we last checked it. An offer we have not been able to check for 24 hours is greyed out and can never be shown as the cheapest, so a shop that stops answering cannot hold the top spot.
Which pages search engines see
A product page is indexed once a shop serving that country has listed it, or once it has an RRP, a release date or open pre-orders there. A set or series page is indexed once one of its products is. A country's pages for a game are indexed only when at least one active shop there sells that game, so a country we barely cover does not fill search results with empty pages. Sorted and filtered views are never indexed. Other pages stay available but are kept out of search results until there is something useful on them.
Commission
Some links to shops earn us a commission if you buy. Shops cannot pay to be listed, to rank higher or to be marked as the cheapest, and an offer with no commission is ranked exactly like one with it.