How we choose, and what we don’t pretend

We research. We do not claim to have tested.

Nobody here has personally used most of these products, and saying otherwise would be a lie that Australian Consumer Law takes seriously. What we have done is read the actual product page for every single item, note what it is, and form a view on who it suits and why.

Where a recommendation rests on a specific technical reason, that reason is stated so you can disagree with it. "Cast iron holds heat when cold meat hits it" is a claim you can check. "Perfect for any dad" is not a claim at all.

Every price was read off a live page

Prices shown are what the merchant displayed on the product page on the date we checked, in Australian dollars. We read the product page rather than the category listing, because the two disagree more often than you would expect. We caught one item advertised at $449 on a category tile and $529 on its own page.

Prices move. The merchant’s checkout is always the final word, and the date we last checked is printed on every card.

We exclude what we cannot verify

Several large Australian retailers load their prices with JavaScript, or block automated access entirely. Rather than publish a price we could not read, we left those merchants out. Cycling and motorsport are the two categories missing for exactly that reason, and they are named as absent on the homepage rather than quietly skipped.

This costs us range. It is the correct trade for a site whose entire pitch is that the numbers are real.

Commission does not set the order

Commission never affects the order. Each collection states its own sort rule directly above the grid, and none of those rules is commission: most pages order by how quickly an item arrives and then by price, a birthday page orders by price because there is no deadline, and Father’s Day spreads one idea across each kind of dad. The commission rates behind each merchant vary by a factor of four, and if that drove the ranking you would be reading a rate card rather than a gift guide.

You can hold us to this. The sort is one function in the source, the rule each page uses is printed on that page, and commission is not an input to any of them.

We publish what not to buy

A guide that only ever recommends is a catalogue. The gifts we tell you to skip are on their own page, with the reason and a better alternative for each.