Wirecutter Deals, Explained

Every day, our Deals team scours the internet for prices that meet our standards on gear and gadgets that our expert journalists have vetted through rigorous and thoughtful testing. Wirecutter offers a curated selection of more than 4,000 recommended picks, any of which could be on sale on a given day. Wirecutter picks are based on thorough reporting, interviewing, and testing by teams of veteran journalists, scientists, and researchers. We also post deals on some items that haven’t gone through the wringer of Wirecutter testing. For full transparency we make sure to label these, ahem, giant bags of gummy bears and tiny hats for your dog as staff favorites.

We often use the phrase “street price” on our Deals page. Street price isn’t the same thing as the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). An item’s street price is the typical price we see for it or its average nonsale price. For example, our runner-up media streamer pick, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K (2021), has an MSRP of $50. However, over the past four to five months, we’ve seen it often at $30, with a few recent discounts that have brought it even lower. As a result, we've adjusted the street price to $40. If our listed street price and the MSRP are the same, it means the item rarely sees any discounts at all, and we take that into account in our assessment of a deal.

When we assess a deal, we use an item’s 12-month price history. To establish year-over-year trends, we’ll happily examine an item’s entire price history, but generally we use a best-price-in-90-days as our standard.

To make sure we’re able to tell you with confidence when a price is truly excellent, we log the entirety of an item’s price history to uncover pricing trends, and then we tell you about the quality of the discount with terms like “new low,” “matches low,” and “recent low.”

The best-in-90-days rule takes into account seasonal pricing: A price for a given item that’s the best price in the 90 days from November to January could be significantly better than the best price from April to June. Our goal in assessing deals is to find discounts that readers are likely to be excited about regardless of the season—but we tend to have even higher expectations during deal-specific windows like Prime Day and Black Friday, where we expect to see the very best deals.

And despite our analytical approach, we aren’t totally rigid in our deal assessments: We know that sometimes you can’t wait three months to see whether the price on that washing machine you need right now, for instance, will drop further. We also recognize that if an item had a great price at $91, it still has a very good price at $93, and our readers will probably be happy to see that good (if not great) deal.

Even if a deal looks solid on the surface, we run an additional battery of checks:

First, we confirm that the seller is a reliable retailer with a solid return policy.

Next, we search for any extra coupons or promos that may make the deal even better. We note if there are member requirements (we prefer and prioritize free memberships) or other limitations such as a shortened or third-party warranty.

Then we take the item all the way to checkout, making sure the coupon codes work and there are no issues; we also keep an eye out for unexpected shipping fees, such as additional charges for a heavy item. The one thing we don’t highlight is Amazon non-Prime shipping costs, which we exclude because so many of our readers are Prime members.

Finally, we cross-check the price to see if other reliable retailers can match or beat it. If another retailer matches the price, we often share the deal from that retailer, as well. Our priority when we do this is to serve you, so we always strive to post deals from retailers who offer the best mix of convenience and trustworthiness.

We on the Wirecutter Deals team are members of the editorial staff—and the Wirecutter editorial staff has no revenue relationship with retail partners and does not negotiate affiliate rates.

Everyone at Wirecutter cares deeply about our readers getting great value from their purchases. We show you our picks regardless of whether Wirecutter makes money on the purchase. In fact, revenue isn’t part of our team’s deal-assessment rubric at all—the best price from a reliable retailer is what we aim to post every time.

When Wirecutter’s affiliate team works with a retailer to negotiate a special deal for Wirecutter readers, the Deals team’s editors provide pricing recommendations that meet our standards. If the retailer cannot meet those standards, we do not post that deal. The bottom line: We wouldn't post it if we wouldn't buy it at the price.

You may wonder how Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day affect our approach. The short answer is that, other than working significantly longer hours and dangerously increasing our caffeine intake, it doesn't change the way we approach the deals. Much like our everyday approach, we put every would-be deal through the same scrutiny, looking at everything from retailer reliability (and in the case of Amazon, seller reliability) to price history.

This process takes time, but our Wirecutter Deals experts apply this rubric to every deal you see on our page, whether it’s a daily deal or a fleeting bargain we post during a big retail event. The price-research methodology we’ve refined, and the internal systems we’ve put into place to allow for more efficient vetting, have taken years to develop. Ultimately, our historical preparation and our research-based approach ensure that any deal we post is one that we would be excited to see ourselves—and I have seven of Wirecutter’s current or former Bluetooth speaker and headset picks in my home office to prove it.