How Deal Radar works

Who runs this

Deal Radar is a small, independent operation. We are not Amazon, and Amazon does not run, endorse, or curate this site — we participate in the Amazon Associates program, and that is the whole relationship with Amazon. We also belong to the affiliate programs of a few other stores, through the CJ affiliate network.

How we make money

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. When you tap a deal here, the link takes you straight to that product on Amazon with our referral tag attached. There is no page in between, nothing extra to click through, and the tag does not change the price you pay — if you buy, Amazon pays us a commission out of its side of the sale. When another store sells the product, the button names that store, the link goes to that store, and that store's own disclosure sits beside it.

Affiliate commissions are the only way this site makes money. No brand or seller pays to appear here, and there is no way to buy a placement — a product gets listed by clearing our scoring bar, or not at all.

How deals get picked — and who picks them

Software does the watching; humans wrote the rules. Our system reads Amazon's current offers for the products we follow and scores each one on how good a deal it looks: how much cheaper than similar products it is, how strong its ratings are, and how well it fits the categories our readers actually click on. Only products that clear our bar are listed.

Most of what we track never clears that bar on a given day — usually because the offer is not strong enough, or because it has too few ratings for us to judge it by. An empty or short page here means the bar did its job, not that we forgot to update.

The short write-ups on our cards are drafted with software assistance and then pass through automated filters before they render: any dollar figure, percentage, star rating, or review count written at posting time is stripped, because the card's own price and rating lines are refreshed after the write-up is not — the card is always the current answer.

Prices on this site

Every price shown is the Amazon price we read most recently, with the date and time we read it printed on the card. We refresh prices at least every 24 hours and stop showing a deal whose price we have not re-checked in that time. Prices on Amazon change, and the price on Amazon at the time of purchase is the one you pay.

What we don't do

• No countdown timers, no “only 3 left.” Nothing on this site counts down, and we never claim scarcity we can't see.
• No invented “was” prices, and no strikethrough. We show the current price and nothing we made up to compare it with.
• No “price mistake” stories. We can measure that a price is low; we cannot know why Amazon set it, so we don't pretend to.
• No detour pages. Deal links go directly to the store named on the button — never to an interstitial, a “continue” page, or a store the button does not name.
• No made-up numbers. Click counts shown on cards are our real measured clicks — never rounded up, never estimated. We hold the number back until a deal has been clicked enough times for it to say something about the deal rather than about our traffic, and when we have no number at all we show nothing rather than a guess.
• No memory-holing. Our posted archive keeps every deal we've shared, marked available-at-last-check or ended, with the time we last checked its price. We don't delete the ones that didn't age well.