You have decided what to buy. Now comes the tiring part: Amazon.ca in one tab, Best Buy in another, Walmart in a third, a search for “is this a good price” in a fourth. Twenty minutes later you know four prices and still do not know whether today is a good day to buy.
We built SaveIQ because that question has three parts, and each part has a plain answer. This guide walks through the three, shows how to answer them by hand, and says honestly what SaveIQ does for you and what it does not.
Question one: is today’s price good for this product?
A price means little by itself. $24.98 for headphones is a fine price if they usually cost $30, and a poor one if they sold for $19.98 three weeks ago. The only way to know is to look at what the product has actually sold for.
This is what the price history is for. SaveIQ reads the last 90 days of prices for an Amazon.ca listing and gives one call: buy, wait, or fair price. Under the call it shows the highest, lowest and average price of those 90 days, so you can check the reasoning yourself.
Question two: is the discount real?
A “−40%” badge compares today’s price with a list price. If the product has not sold at that list price for months, the badge is measuring from a number nobody paid.
SaveIQ checks the list price against the price history. When the struck-through price is higher than anything the product sold for in 90 days, the page says so, and tells you the price to compare with instead.
Question three: does another Canadian store sell it for less?
The same product is often on sale at several Canadian stores, and the cheapest one changes from week to week. Checking each store by hand is the slowest part of buying anything.
On a price check, SaveIQ lists other Canadian stores offering the same product for less, with a link to that store’s own product page. We match by product name, size and pack count, and we drop a listing when the store’s page shows another size. When we cannot match with confidence, the page says “check it yourself” instead of calling it cheaper.
No store pays to appear in that list or to be placed higher. Some links earn SaveIQ a commission; that never changes the verdict or which store is shown.
What to do when the answer is “wait”
Waiting only works if you find out when the price drops. Leave your email on the price check and SaveIQ sends one message when the price falls. There is no account to create and no newsletter attached to it.
If you shop on Amazon.ca often, the free browser extension puts the same verdict on the product page, so you do not need to copy a link.
Where SaveIQ stops
A price check starts from an Amazon.ca listing: paste its link, describe the product, or scan the barcode on the box with your phone. Other stores are shown only when we can match the same product, so an empty list does not prove nobody is cheaper.
Prices are a snapshot from the moment of the check. Confirm the price, the shipping cost and the return policy at the store before you pay. We do not test products; for whether a product is any good, read reviews from people who have used it.