A product marked 60% off sounds exciting. But 60% off what? A product nobody wants? Something with a 2.8-star rating and 14 reviews? An item whose "regular price" was artificially inflated last week specifically to make the discount look dramatic?
Discount percentage is the most visible number in any deal — and the least useful one on its own. A deal's actual value depends on factors most deal sites ignore. Here's the framework we use at Deal.fo.
The Five Factors
Every deal we evaluate gets scored across five dimensions. No single factor makes or breaks a deal — it's the combination that matters.
Product quality. A deal on a bad product is not a deal — it's a discounted mistake. We look at overall rating (minimum 4.0 stars), total review count (minimum 100 reviews — because 5 stars from 7 people tells you nothing), and consistency of recent reviews. A product that was great in 2023 but has a string of one-star reviews in 2026 has a quality problem that the aggregate rating hides.
Discount legitimacy. Is the original price real? We check this by looking at price history. If a product has sold at $49.99 for the last six months and is now "on sale" for $49.99 from a "regular price" of $79.99, that's not a deal — it's marketing. We only count a discount as genuine when the current price is below the product's actual recent selling price, not its theoretical MSRP.
Buyer demand. A 50% discount on something nobody is searching for doesn't save anyone money — it just moves dead inventory. We weight deals higher when they involve products with strong organic demand: items people are actively looking for, in categories with high purchase intent. An air fryer deal in November scores higher than the same deal in February because more people are actively shopping for air fryers pre-holiday.
Price rarity. How often does this product go on sale, and how deep are the typical discounts? AirPods rarely drop below MSRP, so a $30 discount is significant. A Ninja blender goes on sale constantly, so a 20% discount is routine. We track how unusual a price point is relative to the product's pricing history — the rarer the price, the higher the score.
Freshness. A deal found today is worth more than one found a week ago. Prices change, inventory sells out, and promotions expire. Our scoring applies a freshness decay — a deal loses value in our ranking as it ages, because the probability of it still being available decreases with every hour.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Consider two deals side by side. Deal A is 55% off a Bluetooth speaker with a 3.6-star rating and 42 reviews. Deal B is 18% off a Garmin running watch with a 4.7-star rating and 6,700 reviews that almost never goes on sale.
On most deal sites, Deal A would rank higher because the discount percentage is bigger. On Deal.fo, Deal B scores significantly higher — because the product is proven, the price is rare, and the buyer fit is strong. The person buying Deal B is making a smart purchase. The person buying Deal A is buying something cheap.
The Quality Threshold
We maintain a hard quality threshold below which a product won't appear on Deal.fo regardless of discount depth. If a product has fewer than 100 reviews, or a rating below 4.0 stars, or a price below $25 (with narrow exceptions for high-demand items), it doesn't make the cut. This filters out the vast majority of deal clutter — the random Amazon listings with manufactured reviews, the clearance bin items nobody would buy at any price.
This is a deliberate trade-off. We show fewer deals than most aggregators. But every deal we do show has passed a bar that means something. Our goal isn't to show you everything that's on sale — it's to show you the things that are actually worth buying because they happen to be on sale.
The Anti-Deal
The most important thing a deal framework can do is tell you when NOT to buy. If a product is 15% off but its price history shows it drops 30% every Black Friday, the right move is to wait. If a product is 40% off but reviews have trended sharply negative in recent months, the right move is to skip it entirely. And if a product is technically on "sale" but the sale price is exactly what it's sold for continuously, the right move is to ignore the red sale tag entirely.
A framework doesn't just help you find good deals. It protects you from bad ones dressed up to look good.