It’s common practice for retailers to mark prices up or down depending on factors such as demand, seasonal change, and many others. However, what many people may not realize is that the price of a single item can vary from store to store, sometimes quite drastically, even within a single neighborhood. What this means is that with the right tools, shoppers could have a unique opportunity to save big on all kinds of purchases.

As usual though, there is a catch. Markdowns such as these are hard to predict, often springing up out of nowhere and only lasting for a short period of time before disappearing completely. This lack of predictability makes this method of saving money inaccessible to many, but wouldn’t it be great to know the exact price of an item across all nearby stores? What if you had access to a list of items that have been seen marked down in more than one area, so you would know exactly what to look for? With tools such as these, local deal hunting would begin to look a lot more feasible.

These are just a few of the questions that we at BrickSeek have sought to answer, and we began with what seemed like a simple concept. Using Inventory Checkers that allowed anyone to check pricing around them, we were able to gain a better understanding of how items are changing in price around the country.

It wasn’t a perfect system — the lack of predictability sometimes made it challenging for us to provide consistent results. Some of you reading this may be familiar with how things have been up until now. The “as low as” prices displayed for in-store deals indicated the lowest price seen for that deal at what was typically only a small handful of stores scattered throughout the country.

We were successful in providing a list of items that were actively being marked down but had difficulty with adding further insight into how prolific those deals were at different price points. This has been an ongoing challenge for us and something that we will constantly be working towards perfecting.

Today we are happy to announce an update that we feel brings us one step closer to that vision. Replacing the “as low as” price described above will be a more inclusive one. Although it is possible that some users will find a deal for an even lower price than what is indicated on our Deals page, with this update, you will have more clarity than ever around just how widespread an in-store deal really is.

We accomplished this by reporting a commonly seen price and by including the percentage of stores at which we have seen that price with the item in stock. Although at first glance this may appear to be a relatively modest improvement, we feel that it represents a pretty major shift in the way our Deals page works. As with all of our updates, we hope that it leads to more people saving more money more easily than ever.