How Archive Luxury verifies every deal

Gate 1 — Real-price provenance

Every deal published on Archive Luxury must have both a real sale price and a real original (reference) price drawn from distinct source fields on the retailer's product page. That means structured-data fields such as JSON-LD priceSpecification with a ListPricerole, Shopify's compare_at_price, Magento's price and special_price, or an affiliate feed's price and salePrice.

If a retailer only exposes a current sale price, we do not derive an original price by any multiplication, division, or "typical markdown" assumption. We skip the product. This prevents the class of bug — and the class of FTC §5 concern — where a scraper back-calculates an inflated retail price from a sale price to make the deal look better than it is. Our internal documentation enumerates past incidents traced to this pattern; the rule exists because we've seen it happen in the wild.

Gate 2 — Landed-price classification

A real USD number on a retailer's product page is not the same as the true cost to a US shopper. An international retailer can display a USD price via geo-IP currency conversion while still charging the customer duty at delivery. We refuse to treat those two cases as equivalent.

Every retailer we onboard is classified into one of three landed-price modes:

• us_native — retailer is US-domiciled or ships from a US distribution center. No customs interaction. Displayed price is final.
• ddp_included— international retailer with an explicit Delivered Duty Paid policy for US orders. Must be manually verified against the retailer's own post-Aug-29-2025 customer-care / duties-and-taxes page.
• manual_review— default for new retailers and the permanent state for anyone whose landed-price status can't be verified. Products from a manual-review retailer cannot be published.

The type system enforces this: the function that constructs a verified-to-publish payload is typed to reject any retailer in manual_review, which means adding an unverified retailer to our registry is a compile error, not a runtime warning. For the full per-retailer dataset, see our De Minimis Impact Report 2025.

Gate 3 — Canary product auto-disable

Every retailer adapter runs against a small set of known-handle "canary" products on every pipeline run — typically one at a sub-$500 price point, one at $1,000+, and one at $3,000+. Each canary must successfully extract with a price within $5 of the prior run's value. If any canary fails — the product returns 404, the price drifts unexpectedly, or for duty-sensitive retailers the per-product "(duties included)" confirmation string disappears — the entire retailer is flagged needs_review and pulled from active ingestion before any questionable data can reach the public catalog.

What we refuse to do

• Convert a non-USD price using any in-app exchange rate, including "live" rates from Open Exchange Rates, ECB, or similar.
• Estimate an original price by multiplying a sale price by a fixed markdown constant.
• Scrape a retailer's /sale collection only; adapters must walk the full catalog and filter by real compare-at-price signals. Sale pages are curated and incomplete.
• Publish deals from retailers whose landed-price status is unverified.
• Index expired deals in our sitemap. When a deal expires it is dropped from the sitemap the same day, so stale prices can't linger in Google results.

Transparency and commercial model

Archive Luxury earns affiliate commissions — typically 2-6% — when a reader clicks through and purchases from one of the retailers we track. Retailers do not pay for placement, do not influence ranking, and cannot request editorial changes. The verification gates described above run before the commercial relationship is considered. A deal either clears the gates or it doesn't.

Questions, corrections, or requests for additional documentation: nick@archiveluxury.com.