How ShopHop detects a fake special

A "special" is only a saving if the "was" price was real. ShopHop records the shelf price of every tracked product across Woolworths, Coles and Aldi every day, which lets us check a discount against its own history instead of taking the ticket at face value.

For each flagged special we look at the price the product actually sold at over the preceding weeks. If the "regular" price it is being discounted from was only briefly set — or was never really the going price — the discount is not what it appears, and we mark it on the product page.

This mirrors the standard the Federal Court applied in 2026: a "was" price should reflect a genuine, sustained regular price (the court looked at roughly a 12-week window) rather than a number inflated shortly before a promotion. Our detection is deliberately conservative — we only flag a special once we have enough history to be confident.

You can see the logic on any product page: the deal-quality score compares today’s price to 90 days of recorded prices, and genuine markdowns are labelled differently from suspicious ones. Nothing here is invented — every figure traces back to a dated price we recorded.