How we do it

We capture the publicly visible product listings at Woolworths, Coles and Aldi on an ongoing basis. Each capture records the advertised price, any “special” or “was” price, the unit price, pack size, and category. Snapshots are timestamped and stored permanently — we never overwrite historical records.

Coverage as of 17 August 2026: 62,359+ products across 3 retailers, with over 12,175,070 price snapshots in our archive.

When the same product is sold at multiple retailers, we link the listings to a single canonical product. This powers our “where to buy” comparisons and cross-store price records.

A pair of products is only treated as the same item when they line up on every dimension that matters:

• Same brand
• Same size (a 500g pack is never merged with a 600g one)
• Same pack count (a multipack is never treated as a single)
• Same variant or flavour (Original ≠ Sour Cream & Chives)
• Same form (liquid ≠ powder, fresh ≠ frozen)

Matches are built by automated rules (barcode when available, brand + size + name similarity, hard vetoes for flavour/variant/pack conflicts). Ambiguous pairs go to a manual review queue — we do not hand-check every mapping. We deliberately err on the side of not matching when there is any doubt — a wrong match is worse than a missing one.

Every mapping is recorded with its source and confidence. Cross-store coverage is intentionally incomplete (private-label and ALDI exclusives often have no counterpart). Staples are prioritised for precision over raw match count.

The Federal Court found in May 2026 that Coles made misleading representations about 13 of 14 sample Down Down tickets examined at trial (the ACCC's case covers 245 products) — prices were temporarily raised before promotions so the “discounted” price was the same as or higher than the original. ShopHop automatically flags a simpler, related pattern in its own data. Our flag is an indicator, not a legal test.

Public “questionable special” flags on ShopHop are gated by our own observation density — we will not call a special misleading until we have watched the product on enough days. The shipped consumer detector works like this:

Published tiers use neutral labels (observed special, limited “was” history, recurring pattern, price rose then fell). We cite exact dates and prices from our scrape history — verifiable on the product chart. Classifications below our confidence threshold are not shown; patterns that may reflect legitimate cost movement go to a human review queue first.

Detection becomes strongest once a full 90-day baseline is available. The current public baseline is 196-day price history.

Every product page on ShopHop shows the available price history as a chart. The dates and prices we cite in explainers are always verifiable from the chart on the product page — click any flagged special to see the underlying data.

Our scraping timestamps, shelf prices, and sale flags are recorded as shown on the retailer's own product pages. We don't adjust shelf prices, but we recalculate a unit price when the retailer's figure is missing or inconsistent with the pack size.

We track online advertised prices, not in-store prices. These can differ. Loyalty pricing (Everyday Rewards, Flybuys) is not tracked as such. Some Woolworths specials shown publicly are members-only and may appear in comparisons, labelled where we can detect it.

Our cross-store matching is generally reliable but not perfect. Mappings flagged as uncertain are excluded from automatic comparisons until human-verified. If you spot an incorrect match, email us.

Prices are refreshed daily and can lag real-world changes by a day or two. In-store prices may vary and are not verified by ShopHop.