Clearance Critter
Methodology
Everything this site claims about a listing comes from one of the rules below. If a rule cannot be satisfied, the listing is dropped rather than published with a softer label.
Sources
Retailer pages, public deal feeds and third-party price-data services, for the departments listed on the departments page. Priced listings record the source retailer and the time the price was observed. Curated Amazon entries show manufacturer product photos and a link-review date and send you to Amazon for pricing. Configuration-dependent prices are labelled as starting prices. This is a snapshot, not live inventory.
What each label means
| Label | What happened | Shown for |
|---|---|---|
| Verified in stock | We opened the retailer’s own page for that exact item, in USD, available online, at the time shown. | 1 hour from that check |
| Price from a data provider | A managed price API reported the price. Real data, but not a visit to the retailer. | Up to 1 hour from our fetch; shorter if the provider reports an older reading |
| Observed · unverified | A single reading of a retailer page at that time, not re-checked since. | 72 hours from that observation |
Where a provider does not date its own reading, we say the age is unknown rather than guess, and that listing makes no in-stock claim at all. An unrecognised source channel is treated as expired: a label we cannot justify is not published.
Freshness and expiry
A listing’s effective expiry is the earliest of: any status other than active (gone now), the offer’s own expiry date, and the defensive window above over the last real check. A listing with no usable timestamp is treated as expired, not as current. Expired listings are dropped when the site is built, and every page also retires its own listings in your browser — once a minute, and whenever you come back to the tab — so a page left open overnight, or one loaded while our data feed was unavailable, stops showing an expired price and its purchase link. Expired offers leave the live catalog, sitemap and listing pages.
Discount arithmetic
A listed discount is (reference price − listed price) ÷ reference price, and every listing names the reference it used.
- Merchant comparison price
- A list price or other reference chosen by the retailer. It is not proof of a prior selling price, a weekly drop, or the lowest price in the market.
- Stated comparison price
- A figure somebody else stated beside the price, labelled with whose it is: the retailer’s “was” price, its list price, an MSRP (only where the retailer’s data said MSRP), a retailer reference of unstated kind, or a community source’s approximate comparison. It is read off the same check as the price and dropped when it is not above it. No discount, score or ranking is computed from it.
- Past standouts
- A separate home-page shelf of the biggest markdowns we published in the last two weeks that have since left our current deal feed. Each card says “Past find”, and shows the price we saw then alongside a recorded retailer reference. An older or undated reference is labeled approximate. It also shows the date we retrieved it (and the provider’s own reading date, or says it is unknown) and who first reported it. The saving is the difference of those two recorded amounts, never a figure rebuilt from a rounded percentage. These are not current deals: they are not in the deal list, counts, API or assistant tools, and the link only lets you check today’s price at the retailer.
- Observed baseline
- Ours: a summary of the prices we ourselves recorded for that listing over time. It is not an MSRP and not anything the retailer advertised, and it reflects only the period and the frequency at which we happened to look.
- Cross-retailer price comparison
- Current offers for a matching product and variant at other retailers, with known comparable shipping. This compares today’s offers; it does not establish a historical price drop.
- Source-reported deal
- A deal a community source found and published. We show the current price and credit the source with a link to their original post. There is no percentage and no measured saving on these listings: we have never tracked this item’s price ourselves, so the saving is unknown, which is not the same as zero. Where the source stated its own comparison figure, it may be shown crossed out as an approximate “reported comparison” in the source’s name — often a similar item at another retailer, never this retailer’s former price. A source reporting a deal is their endorsement, not our price check — whether we have since confirmed the offer at the retailer is stated separately, in the same words as every other listing.
We distinguish our recorded history from retailer reference prices and current cross-retailer comparisons. We do not publish a “lowest ever” claim.
Ranking
Recommended uses our own quality score for a listing where we have one — it weighs the price against the baseline we observed rather than against whatever the retailer advertises — and the listed discount percentage where we do not, with a small two-point Amazon preference because we earn commissions on qualifying Amazon purchases. This changes the order, never the displayed discount. Lower known prices break ties. Choose a price sort or Biggest listed discount for an order with no merchant preference in it at all. Listings without a price are excluded when you set a budget, and sort last in both price directions: an unknown price is not free and not dear.
Featured finds and Hot deals
Featured finds combines recent community finds with savings supported by our recorded price history. Community finds follow the same publication and expiry rules as the rest of the catalog. Their cards credit the original source and do not claim measured savings. When a price provider does not date its reading, the card explicitly says its age is unknown and does not claim a retailer check. Featured selection leads with the largest markdowns the cards themselves show (a retailer’s stated was, list or reference price, or our recorded history), preferring 40% or more off items over $100, then the most dollars saved, one per category. Listings without a shown markdown fall back to recency and editorial review. Affiliate commissions never affect featured placement. Hot deals is a separate section for prices we watched fall in the last four hours.
Paging and share links
Filters, search and sorting run in your browser over the whole collection; only one page of 24 cards is ever put in the document, so a collection of several thousand listings does not become several thousand elements. The view you are looking at — search, retailer, budget, sort, department, category and page — is kept in the address bar, so the link you copy is the page you were on.