Are you buying at the right time?

Did you know that most ecommerce/online shops fluctuate their prices to attract robots to publish their updated prices? We had an idea but we never suspected that this pricing behaviour was so widely spread.

How do you know if you're buying at the right time? How do you know if that wonderful discounted deal you just saw is really a deal and not just a return to the normal price?

changedetection.io's automatic price graph generator can help you not get ripped off - and understand the market with much better clarity.

Here's a basic example, we enabled the Restock & Price monitor option for this web page and watched for a few months, granted that pokemon can tend to be a bit of a speculators market, however you can clearly see that there is some kind of methodoligical fluctuation.

And another example, a well know underwear seller changes their prices almost weekly.

The other really cool thing is about the Price and Restock monitor is that it will record when the item is in stock/out of stock, represented by the either red or green dots on that price graph. Sometimes the web page being monitored will change their product price machine read data (the LD-JSON for the robots to change) but not the actual real product price, but we can detect that too!

Look at this wild example we caught in the wild - VLand car parts online shop changes their prices by $150 USD!

Supermarket Prices Are Fluctuating. Are You Really Getting a Good Deal?

How price tracking reveals the real cost of everyday products.

Ever noticed how the price of your favourite supermarket products seems to change every week? One week it's on special, the next it's back to full price, and a fortnight later it's discounted again.

This isn't necessarily random. It's often part of a retail strategy called high–low pricing, where products regularly alternate between higher prices and promotional discounts.

The problem? It's difficult to know whether you're actually getting a good deal.

Australia: A Real-World Example

In 2025, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) investigated supermarket pricing practices at major retailers Woolworths and Coles.

The investigation highlighted how frequently supermarkets use promotional pricing, with some products spending approximately half the year on special.

But this isn't uniquely Australian. Similar pricing strategies are used by supermarkets and online retailers worldwide.

We Tracked the Price of Coca-Cola at Woolworths

We monitored the price of a Diet Coca-Cola product at Woolworths Australia throughout 2026 using changedetection.io's Restock & Price monitor (available to everyone)

The results were revealing.

Our price tracker recorded 20 price changes, with the product repeatedly fluctuating between approximately AUD $4.00 and $4.70.

That's a difference of 17.5% relative to the lower price, simply depending on when you shop.

The price history also reveals a repeating pattern: prices fall, recover, and fall again.

At the latest recorded price of $4.70, Changedetection.io identified that the product was more expensive than 84% of its tracked price observations.

Without price history, a customer visiting Woolworths today would have no easy way of knowing this.

Dig deeper - 

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/court-finds-that-coles-misled-customers-over-down-down-claims

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/accc-supermarkets-inquiry-key-takeaways-coles-woolworths-aldi/105079916

Why You Should Track Prices Instead of Trusting Specials

Retailers generally show you what a product costs today, not what it cost last week, last month, or six months ago.

That's where Changedetection.io comes in.

Rather than relying on advertised discounts, you can monitor prices yourself and build an independent record of how they change.

With Changedetection.io's price tracker, you can:

• 📈 See historical prices — discover whether today's price is unusually high or low.
• 🔔 Get price-drop notifications — know when something you regularly buy becomes cheaper.
• 🛒 Identify pricing patterns — spot recurring weekly promotions and price cycles.
• 🌍 Track products worldwide — monitor supermarkets, electronics stores, online retailers and more.
• 💰 Buy at the right time — avoid paying full price for products that are regularly discounted.

Ubiquiti Storage and other storage prices

Monitor the current wild storage and memory price increases, Here's an example monitoring the ubiquiti store restock and prices.

Stop Guessing. Start Tracking.

A 15–20% price fluctuation might not seem enormous on a single grocery item, but across dozens of products and hundreds of shopping trips, those differences can add up.

The next time you see a product advertised as a special, ask yourself:

Is it really cheap today, or was it simply expensive yesterday?

With Changedetection.io, you don't have to guess.