How Expert Reviews finds the best deals for you
We love writing about eye-catching offers on everything from broadband plans to mattresses at Expert Reviews, but what makes a good deal?
As deal-hunters at Expert Reviews, there’s nothing we like more than saving readers money, whether that’s on a shiny new phone, broadband contract, air fryer, smart speaker, mattress or the hundreds of other products we cover. However, it’s not just a case of copying and pasting every reduction we come across – there’s a lot of method in the money-saving madness.
Below, we’ve covered the key things we bear in mind before we recommend a deal, along with answers to common questions we get asked about the bargain-hunting process. And, of course, we’ve included a few links to our frequently updated deals pages if you’d like to take a look for yourself.
How we find the best deals for you
1. Expert advice
This is the heart of every deal we cover. After all, we don’t want to sing the praises of a product or service that we have serious reservations about. Our resident experts are constantly publishing new, impartial reviews on the website and, if they say something isn’t worth your time or money, we won’t recommend it – no matter how good the price reduction or freebie.
That said, we may still write about, for instance, broadband providers that we haven’t managed to review yet if they’re dishing out eye-boggling discounts without a catch. If that’s the case, we’ll always mention that we haven’t put it through its paces and, if applicable, shed some light on its host network or mention the reviews elsewhere online.
2. The budget spectrum
These are tricky financial times, to say the least, and many household or personal budgets will be tight. That means we’ll always try to find a range of different products or services to suit everyone’s needs. Consequently, we’ll indicate the “best budget” option in our deals roundups and news stories, while many of our articles now have nifty tools that you can filter yourself to compare prices.
3. Hidden catches
Unfortunately, deals can sometimes be too good to be true and come with lots of hidden hurdles. Here at Expert Reviews Towers, we pride ourselves on reading between the lines and looking at variables such as lifetime cost, potential price rises, shipping prices, length of warranty and many others to make sure you’re not caught out.
Similarly, we’ve become adept at not being drawn in by the hype. Without naming any names, certain companies like to surround so-so or even permanent deals with layers of attention-grabbing hyperbole. That means that when you see us at Expert Reviews getting excited about a deal, we genuinely are and want to convey that you should be too.
4. Affiliate revenue
Expert Reviews earns commission – known as “affiliate revenue” – on sales via one of our hyperlinks. It’s a vital part of our business that allows us to keep our in-depth testing completely free for you to access, but it never, ever trumps quality or sways how our experts feel about a product or service.
If a deal is rubbish, we simply won’t write about it – regardless of how much affiliate revenue we would gain if we did or whether we have an existing relationship with a company. What’s more, we have no incentive to recommend a bad product or service because we won’t earn any commission if it’s returned, which is another safeguard that means you can trust the deals we deliver to you.
By the same token, none of our editorial staff gets a personal cut of sales or is rewarded by the companies in question for writing a positive deals article. We only have you, the reader, in mind and want you to get the biggest bang for your buck.
5. Recommended retail price (RRP)
Whenever possible, we avoid using the RRP of a product or service when totting how much you’ll be saving with a deal. That’s because, again without highlighting any culprits, certain retailers operate semi-permanent sales based on RRP to make the reductions seem more impressive than they actually are. Instead, we use a range of tools to monitor the actual price history of a product and then calculate an average, which becomes our benchmark for future deals.
6. Sales events
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day – more limited-time sales events seem to pop up every year. However, these huge set pieces don’t affect the deals strategy above at all: yes, more members of staff will be working during them and consuming an inhuman amount of biscuits, but we still won’t write about a deal if it doesn’t live up to our demanding list of criteria.
