How to tell if a gear deal is real
Updated 2026-09-19
A discount is a comparison between two numbers, and only one of them is real. The sale price is what you pay. The list price is whatever the retailer chose to print above it. Sometimes that is the manufacturer's price. Sometimes it is a number nobody ever paid. We cannot fix that, but we can be honest about how we handle it.
The 30% rule
We publish an item when its price is at least 30% under the list price the retailer itself shows, or when we have watched the price fall by at least 5% from what we recorded earlier. Ten percent off is not a deal in this industry. Almost everything is 10% off somewhere, all the time. Thirty is where a price starts to reflect a retailer clearing stock rather than running a promotion.
Right now the site has about 1,800 live deals. Roughly 390 of them sit between 30% and 40% off, 360 between 40% and 50%, and 670 between 50% and 60%. Above 70% off there are fewer than twenty. If you see 80% off on a piece of gear, read the fine print. It is usually a sample size, a discontinued colour, or a mistake.
What "verified" means on a card
Every source is re-read every few hours, and each deal shows when we last saw that price on the retailer's page. If a retailer stops listing an item, we retire the deal within a day rather than leaving a dead link up. Out of stock items do not appear in the feeds at all. We would rather show you fewer deals than send you to a page where your size sold out on Tuesday.
The badge that is hard to earn
"Lowest we have seen" only appears when we have at least three price checks spread over at least a week and the current price is the lowest of them. On a deal we found yesterday that badge is impossible, whatever the discount says. We think that is the right trade. Price history is the one thing a retailer cannot print on a tag, and it is the main reason to look at a deal here instead of on the retailer's own sale page.
Two habits worth keeping
Check the size run before you get excited. Clearance footwear and apparel are often left in the sizes nobody buys, and a 60% off boot in a size 6 is not a deal for most people. And treat any price that is far below every other retailer with a little suspicion until you see it in the cart. The compare block on each deal page shows what the same item costs at other stores; if one store is $100 under the rest, it is worth asking why.