The product's on the shelf — so why did it vanish from the website?
Online listings flicker constantly. How Mai Pantry tells a stock hiccup from a genuine discontinuation, honestly.
Anyone who's tracked a grocery price has seen it: a product you bought last week silently disappears from the supermarket's website, then reappears days later as if nothing happened. Meanwhile it never left the shelf. Websites are not shelves — and a price app that treats them as the same thing will lie to you in both directions.
Why online listings flicker
A product can drop out of a supermarket's website while stocked as normal in store:
- Stock hiccups — out of stock at the web fulfilment store for a day, delisted online, restocked tomorrow.
- Web ranging ≠ shelf ranging — the online catalogue is its own beast, and items move in and out of it.
- Regional catalogues — the same retailer ranges differently by state, so "gone" sometimes just means "not in this state's online view".
Genuine discontinuation happens too — but it's the minority case, and it looks identical on day one.
The honest way to handle a disappearing product
Deleting a product the moment it drops off the website would churn your shopping list daily; keeping it forever would show you prices for things long gone. Mai Pantry splits the difference, openly:
- A product missing from the online range keeps its last known price for a grace window of about five weeks — long enough to ride out stock hiccups and web-ranging noise.
- While it's missing, it's flagged "check in store" so you know the price is last-known, not live-confirmed.
- Only when it stays gone does it drop out of comparisons.
No silent deletions, no stale prices dressed up as fresh ones.
Availability is regional, so we track it regionally
A WA-only yoghurt isn't "unavailable" — it's unavailable in Sydney. Mai Pantry records which regions actually range each product and prices them separately, so a Perth shopper sees the Perth price and an east-coast shopper isn't teased with products their state doesn't stock.
It's the same promise as our honest-specials verdicts: the app should tell you what it knows and how well it knows it.