What FragranceSeek is, and how it works
Buying a fragrance online should be simple. You know the bottle you want, you know the size, and you want to pay a fair price for it. In practice, the same bottle can sit at very different prices on different shops, and checking them all by hand takes an evening. We built FragranceSeek to do that checking for you.
This post explains what the site does, where the prices come from, and how to get the most out of each tool.
One bottle, one size, many shops
The heart of FragranceSeek is the fragrance page. Search for a fragrance by name, pick it from the list, and you land on a page like Creed Aventus EDP. There you see prices from the shops we read, grouped into tables: core discount sites, distributors, major retailers, premium shops and marketplaces.
The point is to compare like with like. A 100 ml bottle is compared with other 100 ml bottles, not with a 50 ml bottle or a travel spray. You can filter by size, and each row shows the shop, the price, the size and a link straight to the listing. Where we know a shop's shipping terms, we show them beside the price, so a cheap bottle with expensive delivery does not look better than it is.
We read 56 shops today, and you can see every one of them, with a short profile and its shipping terms, on our shops page.
Paste a shop link instead of typing
Already looking at a bottle on a shop's site? You do not have to retype the name. Paste the product link into the search box and we read the fragrance from it, then take you to its page so you can see what other shops charge for the same thing.
Discount partners
Some shops are partners of ours. When you buy through one of those links, the shop may pay us a small commission, at no extra cost to you. That is how the site pays for itself. Partner links are marked as affiliate links. Partner shops are shown first and marked, at their real prices, with every other shop's price right there too, so you can always see if someone else is cheaper.
eBay, with seller ratings you can filter
eBay is often where the lowest prices are, and also where the most care is needed. On a fragrance page we list eBay offers alongside the shops, together with each seller's feedback score and percentage. You can use the seller filters to hide sellers below the number of ratings or the feedback percentage you are comfortable with, so you only see listings from sellers you would actually buy from.
Clone Finder
Many people are looking for something that smells like a famous fragrance without the famous price. Our Clone Finder has a page of its own: pick an original, such as Aventus, and it shows Middle Eastern and designer alternatives to it, with their prices. Each alternative comes with its own lowest prices, so you can compare the copy and the original side by side.
On a fragrance page, the "Inspired by" and "Clones" sections do the same job in both directions: what this fragrance is modelled on, and what is modelled on it.
Price Alerts
Not ready to buy yet? On Price Alerts, pick a fragrance and the price you want to pay. We email you once when a shop we read has it at that price or lower. You can set the same alert from any fragrance page.
Beat My Cart
If you have already filled a basket somewhere, Beat My Cart checks it for you. Paste a shared cart link from Jomashop, or your cart from FragranceNet, FragranceX, Amazon, eBay or another shop, and we put each bottle next to the lowest price we found for it at other shops. It is a quick way to see whether one or two items in your basket would be cheaper elsewhere.
Browse when you do not know what you want
Not every visit starts with a name. The houses page lists the houses in our catalogue, from the big designers to the Middle Eastern houses that have grown so quickly in the last few years. Our catalogue holds more than 23,000 fragrances from over 900 houses.
How we read prices
Prices come from the shops themselves: their product feeds, their public product data, their own pages, and the eBay listing service. Each price carries the time we last read it, so you can see how fresh it is. We match each listing to the right fragrance, concentration and size before it goes into a table, because a price for the wrong bottle is worse than no price at all.
Why we built it
Fragrance is one of the few things where the same sealed product, made in the same factory, can cost twice as much in one shop as in another. We think shoppers deserve to see that spread before they pay, and that honest shops deserve to be found. Over the next few posts we will look at why prices vary so much, how some listings make a price look better than it is, and why open prices are good for everyone.
In the meantime, search for the bottle you have been meaning to buy, and see what the shops are asking for it today. You can read more about us on the about page.