Editorial policy

Every price is read by our own software from the retailer's product page or from the retailer's own product feed, and links back to that page. We do not take prices from other comparison sites, and we do not publish a price a shop has not shown us. The most popular parts are re-checked at every shop each night, and the full lists of most shops (Overclockers, CCL, Box, Ebuyer, AWD-IT, Chillblast and Stormforce) are swept every night. Scan limits how many pages we can read, so its older prices are worked through a bit at a time, and Currys and Novatech are read on alternate nights. Every price shows when we read it. A price read more than 7 days ago is marked as possibly out of date, and past 14 days it is left out of build totals, deals and alerts.

Specifications come from the retailer's listing, the manufacturer and open datasets. Benchmarks name their source. A figure we work out ourselves, like a performance estimate, is labelled as an estimate. The retailers page lists every shop we compare.

A price move only counts when the same shop listed the same product at both ends of the period, the new price held for at least six hours, and the move is under 60%, which is nearly always a listing error rather than a real price. A fall must also leave the part under its own 90-day usual price, so a price that bounced back up and down is not reported as a deal. Category figures are trimmed averages, so one odd listing cannot swing them.

Our price news, such as the weekly UK PC prices this week and the monthly UK price index report, is drafted by software from those checked figures and nothing else. A person reads every draft, checks the figures against the live price movers and product pages, and decides whether to publish it. Nothing is published automatically. Each report says when its figures were read.

If something we published is wrong, tell us through the contact page and say which page and which figure. We check it against the shop's page or the source, and if we were wrong we fix the article and it shows an "Updated" date. A correction that changes what an article says gets a note in the article saying what changed. A wrong price on a product page is corrected at the next read, or removed by hand if the listing itself is wrong.

Some links to retailers are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the shop pays us a small commission. It costs you nothing. The site may also carry adverts. Neither decides what we write or which prices we show: prices are listed cheapest first, and a shop that pays us nothing is listed the same as one that does. We do not accept payment for coverage. The retailers page says which shops we have an affiliate arrangement with.

VantaSpec is run by the team described on the about page. Articles are credited to the person who wrote them, or to the VantaSpec team for our data reports and guides. For corrections, press questions or anything else, use the contact page; journalists can find our data and how to cite it on the press page.