How we rank offers

How offers and products are ordered depends on where you are in the service. We describe each case honestly below.

On a product page: the price list

When you are looking at a single product, its offers from different stores are listed by price. The lowest price that is actually in stock comes first, then the rest in ascending order. Where a retailer provides a delivery cost we show it per store, so you can judge the real total. Whether a store pays us or not makes no difference to this order.

If two stores list exactly the same item price, the order is decided like this: in-stock offers come before sold-out ones, offers with a stated delivery cost come before those without one, then the lowest stated delivery cost, and finally the store name in alphabetical order. The order is therefore always the same for equal prices — it is never affected by payment or chance.

When two offers have the same price, we break the tie using, in order: price excluding delivery, price including delivery, stock status, and how complete and recently updated the offer data is.

In category lists, search and the front page

These pages rank products, not the offers within one product, so a single price cannot decide the order. To surface products that are genuinely useful to compare, we weigh several objective signals together, including: whether the product is in stock and how many stores carry it; the lowest available price and its price band; how complete the product and image data is; how relevant the product is to the category or your search; how popular the product is with our visitors and how much it is searched for; and how recently its data was refreshed. Accessories are kept out of the main product results for a category so they do not crowd out the products themselves.

This is more than a single factor, and we would rather be accurate than pretend otherwise. What matters is that the mix is objective and the same for every store.

What never counts, anywhere

Commission, click payments, advertising budgets and commercial relationships carry zero weight in any of the rankings above. A store that pays more cannot buy its way past a cheaper or more relevant competitor. Paid placements, where they occur, are shown in separate areas and clearly labelled — see our advertising disclosure. Found a ranking that looks wrong? Report it.