How We Verify Every Deal

Most luxury-deals sites are rankings of whatever's on sale at whatever retailer they have an affiliate relationship with. The deal gets listed; you decide if it's worth it.

Archive Luxury works differently. Every item we surface passes three verification gates before it's published, and our scraping code is built to reject items that don't have defensible source data — even when the sale price looks great.

Here's the full methodology.

Gate 1: Source Authorization

The retailer has to be in our authorized-retailer registry. Not every store that sells luxury qualifies.

What we require:

• A direct brand relationship with the houses whose product the retailer carries, OR a documented wholesale distribution channel traceable to the brand.
• A US-facing storefront, either US-domiciled (Saks, Neiman, Nordstrom) or explicitly DDP to the US (Mytheresa, THE OUTNET, YOOX, Cettire).
• Clean returns and warranty posture — no end-user surprises.

What we reject:

• Resale platforms (The RealReal, Vestiaire, Rebag). Their product is real; we just don't cover secondary market.
• Grey-market channels, even well-known ones. Warranty and service exposure is different from authorized; that's material.
• Retailers whose landed-price posture is unclear. If a European retailer doesn't explicitly state duties are included, we classify them as manual-review and their deals don't publish until a human verifies DDP.

Gate 2: Price History Validation

This is the gate that rejects the most items, and the one that defines Archive Luxury's editorial discipline.

Our scrapers are forbidden from fabricating prices. Every deal we publish must have:

• A real sale_price_cents from the retailer's structured data — JSON-LD price, Shopify variant price, Magento special_price. Never a number we derived or estimated.
• A real original_price_cents from a distinct source field — JSON-LD highPrice or priceSpecification[ListPrice], Shopify compare_at_price, Magento price. Never estimated from a "typical markdown percentage."
• Confirmed USD currency. Non-USD retailers are skipped entirely; we don't do in-app FX conversion.

This is a binding rule. The scraping codebase will skip a product rather than emit a payload with a fabricated price.

Why: past incidents. Multiple retailer scrapers used ESTIMATED_DISCOUNT_PCT constants to back-calculate "original" prices from sale prices — a $4,400 Gucci item was displayed as $7,563 → $10,805 using a 40% assumed markdown. A small fabricated dataset is worse for users than a large honest one. We rewrote the ingestion layer around this principle.

Beyond the source-field rule, Gate 2 also enforces:

• Not stale. If an item has been "on sale" for more than 3 weeks, the markdown is treated as the real price and the "original" comparison is rejected. Evergreen markdowns aren't sales.
• Minimum 30% discount. Shallower discounts rarely represent genuine markdowns in luxury; most are opportunistic re-pricing.
• Consistent across sources. If two retailers list the same SKU with wildly different "original" prices, we flag for manual review rather than publish both.

Gate 3: Editorial Review

After the data gates, each deal is tagged:

• Category — bags, shoes, ready-to-wear, accessories, jewelry, leather goods.
• Urgency classification — quiet flex (evergreen), pricing anomaly (unusually deep discount), final unit (limited stock).
• Historical low flag — if our price tracker shows this is the lowest the item has ever been, it's flagged.
• Era tag — archive, runway, current season, pre-collection.
• Editorial note — a one-line human-readable explanation of why the deal is notable.

Items above $2,000 receive additional manual review before publishing, because high-ticket deals have a higher standard for verification and editorial framing.

What gets filtered out

On a typical week, the pipeline processes several thousand candidate deals from our authorized retailers. Published count: roughly 40-80 per week.

What gets filtered:

• Items with missing or fabricated original_price (largest category of rejection)
• Items already published in the last 30 days (dedup)
• Items in categories we don't cover (kids, home)
• Items flagged as stale by the 3-week rule
• Items below 30% discount threshold
• Items from retailers flagged as manual_review pending DDP verification

Why we publish less

The central trade-off: a pipeline built for honesty publishes fewer items than a pipeline built for volume.

A site that's willing to estimate "original" prices can surface 10× the deal count. A site that skips manual-review retailers loses some inventory that probably would have been fine. A site that enforces the 3-week stale rule drops deals that other sites are happy to call "sale."

We accept that trade-off because the alternative is surfacing deals where the "discount" is fictional. Once a user has been burned by a fabricated markdown — a bag listed as 50% off an "original" the bag never actually carried — they stop trusting the site entirely. Rebuilding that trust is harder than publishing fewer deals.

What you can verify

Every deal on archiveluxury.com includes a price-history chart. You can see:

• Every price point the item has carried since we started tracking it
• The date and direction of each change
• Whether the current price is a true historical low

If the "WAS" price on our site looks suspicious, the price history is the ground truth. We publish it because we built the pipeline around it.

The summary

Three gates. No fabricated prices. Authorized retailers only. Real discounts with real history. Fewer deals, more trust.

That's the methodology. It's also why our deal count will always be smaller than a site that cares more about volume than about whether the numbers are real.

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Live deals → See verified luxury deals at archiveluxury.com/deals — every listing includes real price history.

Price history → Check any luxury item's real price history on the Archive Luxury price tracker.

Daily digest → Join the email list for a morning roundup of the most-verified deals of the day.

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Archive Luxury verifies every deal against real price history from authorized retailers. No fabricated "original" prices, no stale markdowns, no grey-market listings.