About trail.deals

trail.deals is a small, independent site that watches the prices of hiking and backpacking gear and shows you the ones that have actually dropped. It is run by a small team of outdoor enthusiasts and a good deal of software. There is no sponsored placement, and nobody at a retailer can pay to be on the front page.

Where the deals come from

We read 33 sources every few hours: the sale and outlet pages of REI, Backcountry, Steep & Cheap, CampSaver and Outdoor Gear Exchange, the used listings at GearTrade, and the storefronts of two dozen brands that sell direct, from Black Diamond and Big Agnes to Zpacks, Durston and Enlightened Equipment. Each source is read the same way every time, so a price we show is a price a retailer was showing, not a number typed in by hand.

The 30% rule

An item becomes a deal when its price is at least 30% below the list price the retailer itself displays, or when we have recorded its price falling by at least 5%. Ten percent off does not qualify. We would rather show a few hundred real deals than thousands of promotions. How to tell if a gear deal is real goes into the details, including why list prices deserve some suspicion.

How prices are verified

Sources are re-read on their own schedules, from every few hours for the big retailers to daily for brand stores, and every published deal is re-checked against the retailer at least every eight hours on top of that. The card shows when we last saw the price. If a retailer stops listing an item, the deal is retired within a day. Out of stock items are not shown at all. When we have watched a price for at least a week and it is at its lowest, the deal says so; if we have not, it does not, no matter what the discount tag claims.

Kits

The kits are complete three season backpacking setups, one item per category. Each category has a short list of gear we would carry ourselves, and the kit picks whichever of those is cheapest right now, so the total is a real price you could pay today. The lists are curated by hand and change rarely. The prices change constantly.

How the site makes money

When you click through to a retailer and buy something, some retailers pay us a small commission. It does not change the price you pay. It does not change which deals we show or in what order; the ranking is discount, recency and how many people clicked, and a retailer that pays nothing ranks exactly like one that pays. Deals are never removed for paying too little.

What we do not do

We do not run coupon codes as content. We do not invent urgency; a deal has no countdown timer because we do not know when it ends. We do not store your email address unless you ask for the digest, and we do not sell it.

Corrections

If a price on the site is wrong, the fastest fix is to reply to any digest email and say which deal. Wrong prices get pulled first and investigated second.