How OwlyFinds compares prices
What actually happens when you paste a product link: how we identify the exact variant, why we sometimes show fewer results, how fresh the prices are, and how we make money.
On this page
Price comparison sounds simple until you try it. The hard part is not fetching prices. It is being certain that the two prices you are putting side by side belong to the same phone: same storage, same colour where colour is priced differently, same condition. This post explains how OwlyFinds does that, and where we deliberately stop.
What happens when you paste a link
- We read the product page. We pull the structured data the retailer publishes: the product name, the price, whether it is in stock, and identifiers such as a GTIN or manufacturer part number when the retailer includes one.
- We work out what the product is. Brand, model line, generation, tier, storage, colour, connectivity, condition. Not a name-similarity score, but a set of attributes.
- We check the other UK retailers live. Amazon UK, AO, Currys, John Lewis, Argos, Back Market, musicMagpie and eBay, in parallel, at the moment you ask.
- We publish only the offers we can confirm are the same product, sorted in-stock first, then by ascending price, with new, refurbished and used kept apart.
Identifying the exact product
Retailers do not describe products the same way. One writes "Apple iPhone 16 Plus 256GB Black", another writes "iPhone 16 Plus 5G 256GB AI Mobile Phone - Black", and a third drops the brand entirely because it is already in the page furniture. Some glue words together. Some omit the storage from the title and only state it further down the page.
So we do not compare titles. We parse both sides into attributes and compare those, with two rules that do most of the work:
- Unknown is neutral. If a retailer does not state the colour, that is not evidence of a mismatch. It is simply not evidence.
- A conflict rejects. If one side says 256 GB and the other says 128 GB, or one says Pro and the other says Pro XL, that is not the same product, however similar the names look.
Where a retailer publishes a GTIN or MPN we use it, because it settles the question outright. Most of the time nobody publishes one, and the attributes are what we have.
Why we sometimes show fewer results than you expect
This is the most common question we get, and the answer is that we would rather show you four prices we trust than eight prices we do not.
We will not price a variant we cannot confirm. If you asked about a 256 GB phone and a retailer's page only tells us the model, we do not put its 128 GB price on your screen and hope. Capacity is the single biggest driver of price on a phone, and colour is priced differently at some retailers too. When the variant is unconfirmed, we leave the row out rather than publish a number that looks like a bargain because it is a smaller phone.
Some retailers block automated checks. That is their prerogative. When a retailer will not answer, we show nothing for that retailer rather than inventing a placeholder.
Some products genuinely are not stocked everywhere. A missing row is often just the truth about UK availability.
New, refurbished and used stay separate
We never merge conditions into one "best price".
New offers, refurbished offers and used offers are labelled and listed separately, because they are different purchases with different warranties and different risks. A refurbished phone at a refurbished price is correctly cheaper; showing it as the price for that product would be misleading. If you want the refurbished route, our guide to refurbished phone grades covers what the grade names actually mean, and our new vs refurbished framework covers when the saving is worth taking.
How fresh a price is
Prices move, sometimes several times a day. We store what we find and re-check any offer that is more than 24 hours old, so the figures you see are either live from that moment or recent.
We also show stock status, and we sort in-stock offers above out-of-stock ones, because a cheap price on something nobody can send you is not a useful result.
How we make money
OwlyFinds is free, and it has to pay for itself somehow. Here is the whole picture.
Some of our links are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the shop may pay us a small commission at no extra cost to you. The rest are plain links that earn us nothing, and our affiliate disclosure says which shops are which. Either way, the commission plays no part in the ranking. Offers are sorted in-stock first and then by price, full stop. There is no paid placement, no sponsored row, and no retailer that gets bumped up for being a partner. If the cheapest in-stock offer is at a retailer that pays us nothing, that is the offer at the top.
You should be sceptical of that claim by default, which is exactly why the ordering rule is a single sentence and never has exceptions. It is easy to check: the top row is always the cheapest in-stock offer of that condition.
Wrong price? Tell us
Every offer row has a "Wrong price?" link, and there is a feedback button on every page. Use them liberally.
Reports go straight to us with the product, the retailer, and the page you were on, so we can reproduce the problem without a long email exchange. We read all of them. When a report shows we matched the wrong variant, that becomes a test case. The matching rules get measured against a labelled set of real examples, so a fix has to prove it improves accuracy overall rather than just patching the one listing you reported.
It is the single most useful thing you can do for the site, and it takes about ten seconds.
What to do
- Paste the product URL from any supported UK retailer. The more specific the page, the better the match.
- Check the condition label on each row before comparing prices; new and refurbished are not interchangeable.
- Read the storage and colour on the retailer's page before you buy, especially on a phone.
- Treat the price as a strong signal, not a contract. Confirm it at the retailer's checkout.
- If a row looks wrong, hit "Wrong price?". That is how the matching gets better.