How we collect and compare coffee prices

A price comparison is only worth reading if you can check how it was made. This is the whole method: the sources, the arithmetic, the update cycle, and the specific claims we refuse to make because we cannot back them.

Where prices come from

Product data and prices are pulled from retailer product feeds — currently the Amazon Creators API for the UK marketplace — and stored against a single canonical record per product, keyed on its ASIN. One product means one page on this site, no matter how many places it is sold, which is why you will never find the same coffee duplicated under a category, a review or a retailer folder.

A product only becomes visible once it has been published, which means somebody has checked that the format, weight, pod count and brand were parsed correctly. Nothing appears on the site straight from an automated import.

How often prices update

Prices refresh on a rolling basis and every page renders from the current stored value at the moment you load it — comparison pages, brand pages and article product cards alike. Nothing on this site is a price frozen into a page when it was written.

Retail prices still move faster than any comparison site can follow. The price you see was the last one we fetched, and the retailer’s own page is always the authority at the moment you buy.

How price per cup is calculated

Every product is converted onto one unit before it is ranked against anything else, using a fixed dose per format:

Price per kilogram is the pack price divided by pack weight, and is shown wherever a product has a meaningful weight. It is the better unit for choosing between two bags of the same format; cost per cup is the better unit for choosing between formats.

The figure covers the coffee and nothing else — not milk, water, electricity, the machine or its consumables. Those vary too much between households to fold in without making the comparison less useful. Where a machine cost genuinely changes the answer, we say so in the price-per-cup guide rather than hiding it in the arithmetic.

How retailers are compared

Products are ranked purely on cost per cup, ascending. Affiliate relationships have no effect on the order and never will — the ranking is a pure sort on a number we calculate ourselves. Where we hold prices from more than one retailer for the same product, the lowest is the one shown and the retailer count is displayed alongside it.

How offers are handled

We do not republish “was/now” claims. A retailer’s reference price is theirs to assert, not ours to verify, and it tells you nothing about whether a coffee is good value. Instead, the offers page works from our own data: we take the median cost per cup for each format across the whole catalogue and surface products sitting meaningfully below it.

That means the offers page can be short, or occasionally empty. That is what an honest one looks like in a quiet week.

How reviews and ratings work

Product reviews are written only where we have tasted the coffee, and only where we can say something the product page does not already tell you. A review that repeats the spec sheet is worse than no review, so this section grows slowly.

Brand reviews are different: they are analyses of where a brand’s range sits on price against the rest of the market, generated from figures we hold. They make no claims about taste, because we have no data about taste.

For coffee shops, user ratings and our own editorial score are kept strictly separate and are never merged into one number. We publish a user rating only where we collected the reviews behind it and display them, and we publish a shop’s hours and prices only after somebody has checked them — with the date of that check shown on the page.

What we will not claim

• That a price is current at the moment you read it. It is the last one we fetched.
• That we cover every coffee sold in the UK. We cover what we have published.
• That a discount is real because a retailer says so.
• A rating for a coffee shop we have not verified, or a tasting note for a coffee we have not drunk.

Corrections

If a price, a weight or a shop detail is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Contact details are on the contact page.