FAQ
Answers to the questions we actually get asked.
Short, plain answers. If you have a question that isn’t covered here, email hello@gearfinch.com — we read everything and update this page when patterns show up.
01
How do you decide something is a real deal?
For each product we’ve been tracking, we compare today’s price to the last 90 days of observations. A deal has to be meaningfully cheaper than that rolling baseline — at least 15% off the retailer’s own compare-at price, and at or below the lowest in-stock price we’ve recorded in 90 days. That’s stricter than most “sale” banners, which is why our list is shorter than a typical deal site.
02
Why do you ignore the “was” price on the retailer’s own site?
Because the compare-at price is, legally, mostly a number the brand can choose. We’ve watched brands keep a $72 “was” on a $58 bra for six straight weeks — the strikethrough is real on the page, but the $72 hasn’t been observed once in three months. Rather than trust the retailer’s math, we compute our own discount against what we’ve actually seen the product sell for.
03
How does Gearfinch make money?
Affiliate commissions, fully disclosed. When you click a deal and end up buying from the brand, the brand (or the affiliate network between us) pays us a small percentage of the sale — typically 4% to 15%. It never changes the price you pay. No brand can pay for placement, the ranking algorithm doesn’t know which brands pay better, and there are no sponsored slots. If you’d rather visit the brand directly, the prices you see on Gearfinch are the real prices on their site.
04
Where does your price data come from?
We fetch publicly available price + stock data directly from each brand we track. For Shopify-hosted brands that’s the public products feed. For brands on other platforms (currently Gymshark) we parse the same embedded data that powers the brand’s own search page. Each fetch records a timestamped row in a time-series database — we never overwrite, so the 90-day history is a real log, not an estimate.
05
Why aren’t some brands I know tracked yet?
Mostly because adding a brand cleanly takes time — writing an adapter, normalizing their categories to ours, stabilizing the scrape, and in many cases applying to the brand’s affiliate program. Some larger brands (Lululemon, Under Armour) actively block automated price fetching, which means we need a different integration path or affiliate data feed before we can add them. If there’s a specific brand you want us to add, email hello@gearfinch.com with the brand name and we’ll prioritize based on demand.
06
How often do prices update?
Every product we track gets re-fetched every three hours on average — more frequently for brands that respond well to standard requests, a little less for brands where we need to throttle. Each fetch writes a new row rather than replacing the previous one, so the price history chart on product pages is a real sequence of observations, not a sample. If you see a timestamp on Gearfinch, the price was checked at that timestamp.
07
Why does a price fall back to USD on my market?
Because we haven’t yet scraped that specific product in your market’s currency. We never fake a conversion — quoting an FX-converted USD price as if it were EUR or GBP would be misleading (Shopify Markets and retailer tax handling often don’t follow exchange rates). So when we don’t have a native EUR/GBP observation yet, we show the USD price with a small disclaimer. As soon as the product turns up in the next scrape of your market, it flips to native currency.
08
Can I ask you to add a brand?
Yes. Email hello@gearfinch.com with the brand name and a link to their site. We add brands based on reader demand, scrape-feasibility (some platforms are easier than others), and whether an affiliate program exists so the brand isn’t free-riding on our bandwidth. We reply to every request, even when the answer is “not yet, here’s why.”
09
Do you sell or share my data?
No. We don’t sell your data, rent it, or share it with data brokers. We use PostHog for anonymous analytics (no personal info, no cross-site tracking) and Supabase for our own database. We don’t run Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, or third-party ad trackers. Our full privacy policy is at /privacy — it spells out exactly what we do collect, for what purpose, and how long we keep it.
10
How do I unsubscribe from the newsletter?
Click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email we send you — it’s a signed, no-login-required link, and one click is all it takes. We also send the `List-Unsubscribe` header so Gmail and other clients can unsubscribe you from their UI without opening the email. Once you unsubscribe, your email is removed from our active list immediately, and your record is permanently deleted within 30 days.
11
What rights do I have under GDPR or CCPA?
Under both frameworks, you have the right to access the data we hold about you, correct inaccuracies, delete it (right to be forgotten), export it in a portable format, object to processing, and withdraw consent at any time. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@gearfinch.com — we respond within 30 days, usually faster. Our full privacy policy at /privacy has the detailed breakdown.
12
Why is a deal I saw yesterday not showing for me today?
Two likely reasons. Either the price moved back up at the retailer (activewear sales are often flash-style and the discount ended), or the product went out of stock in your size and we no longer flag it as a deal. You can always see the 90-day price history on the product page to confirm what happened. If the same product is still on sale when you view it from another market (say, US vs. FR), that usually means the retailer priced it differently per country — we don’t FX-convert, we report each market separately.
Still have a question?
Email us at hello@gearfinch.com — we read every message, and we add common ones to this page.