About wowpriced
We used to help make the prices. Now we check them.
Where we came from
We spent years on sales floors and behind store counters. We hung the signs. We built the end caps. We learned, early and often, how a "regular price" gets born.
Here is the part most shoppers never see. A list price is not a measurement. It is a decision. Someone picks a number high enough that the sale number underneath it looks like a gift. The bigger the gap, the better the sign works. That is the whole trick, and it works on nearly everyone, including us.
The anchor trick, in all its outfits
Retail has a name for this: anchor pricing. Show a big number first, and every number after it feels small. The trick wears a lot of costumes.
- Inflated MSRPs on marketplaces. On many marketplaces the seller picks the "list price" themselves. Some pick a number nobody has ever paid.
- "Compare at" tags. Compare at what? Where? When? The tag rarely says, because the honest answer is often "nowhere."
- Strike-through theater. A crossed-out price is a stage prop. It only means something if that price was real, recent, and actually charged.
- Coupons on prices nobody paid. A 30% coupon on a price that was raised 30% last week is a coupon for zero.
- "Was" prices that never were. Some items go on "sale" the day they arrive and stay there forever. The "was" is fiction with a dollar sign.
None of this is rare, and most of it is legal. It is just tiring. You end up doing math in the aisle, phone in one hand, trying to work out if a deal is a deal.
What we do about it
We built wowpriced to do that math for you, and to show our work.
Every price we publish is backed by a word-for-word quote from the source, and a program checks that the quote really says what we say it says. No quote, no deal.
A "fake list price" critic looks at every claimed regular price and throws out the ones that are not believable. A 90% discount off a made-up number is a 0% discount, and it does not get on the wall.
Amazon prices are re-checked live before we publish. When a deal dies, we mark it GONE instead of leaving it up to waste your click.
When two or more independent sources agree on a deal, the card gets a "2+ sources" badge. When the price sits well below what we, or Keepa's 90-day Amazon history, have seen for that item, it gets a "price history" badge.
We set floors and stick to them: 40% off or better for new items, 50% off or better for used and open-box. The wall refreshes every 10 minutes. Deals that died in the last 48 hours sit in a "Just missed" strip, so you can see how fast the good ones go.
Every deal links straight to the seller and credits the source that found it. Some of those links are the source's affiliate links. That is how they keep the lights on, and we think they earned it.
What we will not do
No fake urgency. No invented countdowns, no "only 3 left" unless the seller said so.
No made-up prices. If we cannot quote it, we do not publish it.
No copying other deal sites. We check sources, credit them by name, and link to them.
The promise
The site stays free. The $9.99 a month membership emails you every verified deal the hour it is found, bundled at most once an hour, cancel anytime. That is the whole business. No ads dressed up as deals, no pop-ups, no spin.
We spent a long time helping stores make prices look good. We would rather help you find the ones that actually are.