Consumers first, always. It is our number one core value as a company, and it’s our promise to you. We always consider the best interests of consumers when we decide to work with a retailer and when we post a deal. Online retail has expanded massively, and not all expansion has been a good thing. With increasing frequency, we hear from people who have had disappointing online shopping experiences. At Brad’s Deals, we want to help you have less of those. Our team of deal editors are shopping experts that are trained to detect when something about a retailer or a deal is suspicious. We also have high standards for high-risk product categories

Assessing Retailers

A deal editor vets every retailer to ensure that they are up to our standards before we post a deal.

  • We review their site, making note of bad design, typos, and other signs that they are unprofessional.
  • We research their reputation on review sites and social media. It’s okay to see complaints, as long as we see them being dealt with properly. A lack of any complaints on Facebook can make us suspicious that the company is deleting comments rather than dealing with them.
  • Editors are trained to recognize counterfeit goods, and we will not post for any company that sells them. If we have questions about how a retailer acquired branded products, we will ask them to provide us with documentation on the source of these products for verification.

We follow a similar process for third-party sellers on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart.

  • We research sellers and dig into their feedback. It isn’t just a low percentage of negative reviews that we look at, but we also want to see what types of complaints they get. “They took my money and never sent me anything” is much worse than “The package was hard to open.”
  • We check seller ratings on Fakespot to analyze reviews for a number of marketplaces, rate sellers and products by their reviews, and look for any signs of fraud or manipulation. For more information about how we use Fakespot, read about the Fakespot Verified flag you see on some of our deals.
  • We verify sellers are authorized to sell the products they are selling. For example, if a seller has a number of name-brand TVs, we want to make sure they are authorized to sell those brands.

Assessing Deals

Every single deal we post is evaluated by highly trained deal editors. We check that the products are the lowest price anywhere, and we make sure it is something we’d use ourselves or recommend to a friend or family member.

  • We perform a price check to confirm the product isn’t available anywhere else at a lower price. This can involve multiple searches because of differences in product names at different retailers.
  • We consider shipping cost when performing price comparisons.
  • We are also mindful of other offers, such as gifts with purchase, cashback offers, and rebates that may impact the overall value.
  • We look at our historic records to make sure it’s deal-worthy pricing, taking seasonality into account.
  • We only post products that we believe have a decent amount of inventory, however we don’t always know inventory numbers, and we make an educated guess.

Any product that is being sold by a third-party on an online marketplace goes through an extra level of scrutiny.

  • We run all products through Fakespot.
  • The product must have a C rating or higher.
  • We have special vetting rules in place for high-risk categories. These are things that are consumed (like vitamins), applied to your skin (like eye cream), for children (like toys), and electronics.
  • For most high-risk categories being sold by a third-party, we require an “A” rating. In the case of electronics with lithium batteries, we will not post any of these products from a third-party seller.

Our team is committed to creating the consumer advantage and providing our readers with great deals so they can buy with confidence. We don’t claim to be perfect, but we are real people working hard to give consumers the upper hand.