How we decide a genuine discount
Last updated: 4 November 2026
DealHunters is a comparison site, not a shop. We track prices at South African online stores and list an item only when the saving checks out against that store’s own recent prices.
What counts as a genuine discount
- Today’s price must be below what the same store charged in recent weeks, not only below the “was” printed on the ticket.
- The drop must be at least 10% and R20. Tiny markdowns and rounding noise stay off the list.
- A “was” we have never seen the store charge is treated as a listed was, not a verified saving. We still show the ticket so you can judge it.
- We hold retailers to the “was” they advertise: if history does not support it, the deal does not get a verified-saving label and inflate-then-discount patterns are kept off public lists.
What we never do
We never promote mistyped or incorrect prices as a selling point. If a price looks like a store mistake, it is not a DealHunters headline. Confirm the final price on the retailer’s site before you buy.
Where the data comes from
Product URLs, titles, images and prices come from public store feeds and sitemaps (and schema.org Product markup on those pages). We honour each store’s robots.txt, including crawl-delay. We do not scrape behind logins or paywalls.
How often we update
Each store has its own crawl interval. Quiet catalogues slow down (up to about 24 hours); catalogues that keep changing are checked more often (as often as about every hour). Large stores are sampled in slices so we refresh known products without requesting every URL every time. Stores currently crawling successfully average about 8.5 hours between runs.
What we track right now
These counts come from our live database: 1 531 stores, 831 976 products with a current price, and 78 815 genuine deals on the public list. They move as crawls finish.
Related: About us · Original research · Terms