Shelfbee FAQ

Grocery, pharmacy, baby, and household prices across the Greater Toronto Area's major banners — including Walmart, No Frills, Food Basics, Shoppers Drug Mart, Costco, Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws, Fortinos, and Your Independent Grocer. This week's flyer deals from roughly twenty more retailers (Longos, Highland Farms, Sobeys, Metro, and others) are folded in as supplementary results.

Any FSA in the Greater Toronto Area. Results within a default 5-kilometre radius; the radius is adjustable in the search sidebar up to 50 km. Postal codes outside the GTA fall back to the closest in-range branches but may have sparser coverage.

Retailers publish their prices differently, so the depth we can offer varies. For some we track the full catalogue; for others we surface this week's flyer deals. We're always expanding coverage — including through direct partnerships with independent grocers who'd rather share a clean feed than be compared from the outside. If a store you shop at is missing, tell us and we'll prioritise it by real demand.

Real cost = shelf price plus what the drive costs you in gas and time. A small saving far from home often costs more in driving and time than it saves — real cost makes that visible so it isn't sold to you as a saving. Best Value ranks by real cost by default; switch to the Cheapest sort for shelf price alone.

Best Value sorts by query relevance first, then by real cost as the tiebreaker. If you searched for 'natrel milk' and a Natrel product is $5.79 but a generic dairy alternative is $2.79, the Natrel result ranks higher because you typed that brand. To override and see the cheapest item irrespective of relevance, switch to the 'Cheapest' sort pill.

Cheapest sorts purely by shelf price (with unit price as a tiebreaker for tied shelf prices). Best Value sorts by real cost (shelf + travel) within relevance bands. Cheapest is the right answer when you'll be at that store anyway; Best Value is the right answer when you're deciding where to drive.

Tracked prices are refreshed weekly, after the Thursday flyer drop, and a search can surface an even fresher price when one is available. Every offer card carries its own last-refreshed timestamp so you always know how current a price is.

You still see the most recent price we have, clearly timestamped, rather than an empty result. A freshness banner tells you how current the data is, and the footer reminds you that prices may differ at the store — always verify before purchase.

No. Search, real-cost ranking, and the shopping list all work for anonymous visitors. Signing up unlocks personalisation — retailer preferences per category, dietary stamps on results, watchlists, and price-drop alerts — but the core comparison is free and never gated.

A Canadian data centre (Montreal region). Search queries are hashed at the IP level and auto-purge after 90 days. Marketing consent is opt-in, off by default, and follows CASL (Canada's anti-spam law). The Privacy page details every column we retain and the right-to-delete pathway.

Yes. The /settings page has a 'Delete my account' action that anonymises all PII immediately. Aggregate, anonymised price data is retained for analytics but is never linkable to any individual.

Some retailer links earn a commission. Ranking is never weighted by commission rate — every offer is sorted by real cost using the same formula, regardless of whether we earn anything from that retailer. The footer of every results page carries this disclosure.

The consumer search is free. A future premium tier ($4.99/month) is planned to add alerts beyond watchlist defaults, multi-store trip optimisation, and family sharing — but the real-cost comparison itself stays free. Long-term, the business is supported by data and analytics products for the grocery industry, not by monetising the consumer experience.