Shelfbee FAQ

Grocery, pharmacy, baby, and household prices across six tracked retailers in the Greater Toronto Area: Walmart Canada, No Frills, Food Basics, Shoppers Drug Mart, Costco, and Real Canadian Superstore. Loblaws, Fortinos, and Your Independent Grocer are also covered through the Loblaws-platform retailer chain. Flyer data from roughly twenty more retailers (Longos, Highland Farms, Dollarama, Sobeys, Metro, and others) is folded in as supplementary live 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.

Walmart and Food Basics use professional anti-bot defences (Akamai and Cloudflare respectively) that would require paid bypass services we can't justify pre-revenue. Their headline flyer deals still flow through via the Flipp aggregator. Independent retailers (Longos, FreshCo, T&T, Galleria, Highland Farms, Adonis) are higher on the partnership roadmap because they're squeezed by the duopoly and have an incentive to share clean feeds in exchange for placement.

Real cost = shelf price + distance × $0.55 per kilometre + drive time × $0.33 per minute. The per-km figure tracks Canadian Automobile Association estimates for an average compact car (gas, depreciation, insurance, maintenance prorated to distance). The per-minute figure values your time at $20 per hour. A $0.50 saving 25 kilometres away costs $13.75 in driving plus $9.90 in time — the formula makes that visible so it isn't sold to you as a saving.

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 stores are scraped every Friday morning, after the Thursday flyer drop. When you search a specific item, Shelfbee also fires a live on-demand check against the Loblaws-platform retailers in your radius, so the freshest available price always surfaces. Each offer card carries its own last-refreshed timestamp.

Cached fallbacks. A scrape failure never returns an empty page — we fall back to the last-known prices and show a freshness banner so you know what you're looking at. The footer disclaimer 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.

Supabase ca-central-1 (Montreal). 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 price-history data is retained for the B2B competitive-intelligence product but is not 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 revenue comes from B2B competitive-intelligence dashboards sold to retailers and FMCG brands, not from monetising the consumer.