About The Undersold

The short version: most "sale" prices are theatre. We track what things actually cost, every night, so we can tell you which discounts are real.

Why this exists

Retailers set an "original price" that the item may never have sold for, then mark it down permanently so an ordinary price looks like an event. Strike-through pricing is the most effective trick in retail, and it works because shoppers have no way to check.

We check. Every night we record the price of every item we track, so a discount can be measured against the item's own history instead of a number someone made up.

What we actually do

Sweep 29 retailers every night and record every price we see.
Compare each item's price to what we have watched it sell for.
Surface the ones that are genuinely low, and show the evidence on the card.
Rank by what we can prove, not by whichever item claims the biggest percentage off.

What we don't do

We are not a store. We don't sell anything, take payment, hold inventory or handle orders. You buy from the retailer, on the retailer's own site, at the retailer's price. We just tell you when something is worth looking at.

We also don't accept payment to feature an item, and we don't let any commercial relationship change what we show you or the order we show it in.

Being straight about the limits

Our price history starts when we started tracking an item — not when it first went on sale. Where we don't have enough history to make a claim, we say what we do know (that it's an open-box unit, or simply what it sells for new) rather than inventing a low. How it works explains exactly where the line is.

How we keep the lights on

The Undersold is free and has no accounts. It is paid for two ways: display advertising, and retailer affiliate programs where a link earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.

Neither one touches the deals. An advertiser cannot buy a place in the rankings, a better score, or an appearance on the site at all — ads live in ad slots and are marked as ads. The list itself is ordered by recorded price history and nothing else. That separation is the whole product; if we sold it, there would be nothing here worth reading.

Who runs it

The Undersold is an independent site built and operated by ClarityForge, Cory Dickes' data and software practice in North Carolina. It isn't owned by, affiliated with or endorsed by any retailer it tracks. Questions: [email protected].

Brought to you by

Your systems already know. They just won't tell you.

The Undersold is one of ours. We built the price record nobody else keeps, then made it useful. If your business is sitting on data it can't get at, that's the work.

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