A product is an item that is available for sale. It may be available at several different stores. Each product has a number of prices captured against it, with each price at a specific time and at a specific store.

If, for example, you see Product X at Store A, you will need the following pieces of information:

• Store - Which store was this seen at?
• Name - What is the name of the product, including flavours/types/attributes?
• Size/Unit - Did it have a weight or volume? Was it a single item, or perhaps a multi-pack?
• Price - What was the exact price in Rands?
• On Special? - Was there an indication that this was a special price or a promotional offer?

Going onto PriceShare, you need to determine if this product already exists. To search for the product, either use the search page, or view the catalogues. If you find it, open the page for the product and click on "Update This Price" to set the latest price.

If the product is not found, go to the Add Product page and enter the required information. If you accidentally create a duplicate of an existing product, admin staff will merge the two into one.

There are also methods to add products and prices in bulk, but this option is limited to admin staff, because of the risk of abuse. If you are contributing regularly to prices and have built up a track record, speak to admin about getting access to this feature.

When you have a particular store in mind, PriceShare selects the most recent price. When comparing across stores, the most recent price from each store is obtained, and the cheapest of those is used, including specials. Where prices are equal, the most recent is used. However, if a price is older than 16 weeks, it will only be used for a specific store, and not used in comparisons across multiple stores.

Certain products come in different flavours or variations, but are always the same price. You can imagine an example with chips, where tomato flavour and cheese flavour are technically two different products, but they are always the same price and weigh the same. The advantage here is that if you know the price of the tomato flavour, you essentially know the price of the cheese flavour too.

However, if the store stocks tomato flavour, you don't have a guarantee that they'll stock cheese flavour. Thus the price is a guideline, but we are more hesitant to over-use it throughout the site, in case customers assume that a certain flavour will be stocked.

"Linked products" describe these groups of products, and if you view a single product, you can see a list of linked products. You can compare these products to get an idea of the latest price, especially if you feel that the currently viewed one might be outdated, or might be available for less elsewhere.