How HugFab works

Retailers publish product feeds — machine-readable lists of what they stock, at what price, in what sizes, and whether it is available. We read those feeds on a schedule and store what they say.

We do not set prices, negotiate them, or adjust them. If a retailer raises a price, the figure here changes when their feed does. If our copy is stale, the retailer’s own page is always the authority — which is why the buy button sends you there rather than trying to sell you anything here.

This is the hard part, and the part that decides whether a comparison is worth anything. Two shops describe one jacket in two different ways, with two different titles and two different internal codes. Getting it wrong means either showing the same jacket twice, or pricing one shop’s item with another shop’s number.

So we work from strongest evidence to weakest:

• BarcodesA GTIN, EAN, UPC or ISBN identifies a specific manufactured item. All of them normalise to one form and the check digit is verified, so one shop’s UPC and another’s EAN for the same item compare equal. A barcode whose check digit does not add up is discarded rather than trusted — feeds put internal codes in columns labelled “EAN” constantly.
• Brand plus a manufacturer codeWeaker, but reliable enough to merge when the brand agrees too.
• Everything elseMatching attributes, or titles that merely resemble each other, are never enough on their own. Those pairs go to a review queue for a person to decide.

The threshold for merging automatically is deliberately out of reach for that last group — not as a policy someone has to remember, but as arithmetic: those scores are capped below the merge threshold by construction. Two products left temporarily separate is a small annoyance. Two unrelated products merged is a wrong price shown to a shopper, which is not.

The cheapest offer you can actually buy. Out-of-stock offers sink below every available one regardless of price, because a price you cannot pay is not a competitive price.

Where a retailer supplies both a current and a previous price, the discount shown is calculated from those two figures — never supplied to us as a claim. Where they supply no previous price, no discount is shown, rather than a discount of zero dressed up as a saving.

When you go to a retailer through a link here and buy something, that retailer may pay HugFab a commission. That is the entire business model.

It does not change your price, and it does not change the ordering: offers are sorted by what they cost and whether they are in stock, not by what they pay us. Every page with an outbound retailer link carries this disclosure, and so does the footer of every page on the site.