Only 1.5% of Iranian shop prices say when they were set
“Today's price” is written everywhere; a date is written almost nowhere. Across 2,590 real prices read off sellers' own pages, only 40 carried a last-updated date, and only 25 shops out of 607 publish one at all. Worse: of those 40, seventeen were over a month old and the oldest was 264 days.
In a market where prices move week to week, a price without a date is a claim without a time. We read prices off the seller's own page, and while we are there we look for one simple thing: a line saying when that price was last updated. This is a count of how many shops actually write it.
- 2,590
- prices read off seller pages
- 40
- that carried a date
- 25 of 607
- shops that publish one
- 18 days
- median age of the dated prices
What we accept as a date, and what we refuse
The only thing we accept as a price date is a line the shopper can actually see on the page, mentioning both a price and an update — something like “price last updated: 1404/03/12”. We deliberately ignore the hidden timestamps in the page's markup: on WordPress and WooCommerce those are the post's last edit time, not the price's, so an article whose typo was fixed yesterday would show last year's price as “updated yesterday”. That decision makes our number smaller and makes it honest.
Who writes a date
| Where the price came from | Dated prices |
|---|---|
| Shops listed on Torob | 17 |
| Shops found via Google | 14 |
| Shops listed on Emalls | 9 |
| Digikala (1,238 prices) | none |
That isn't really a mark against Digikala: a marketplace price updates when the seller changes it, which is a different mechanism from a steel merchant typing today's number into a page. But the consequence for the buyer is the same — there is no way to tell how long that number has been sitting there.
And even the dated ones are not fresh
- Up to a week10
- One week to a month13
- One to three months11
- Over three months6
So publishing a date is not a guarantee of freshness; it is a guarantee that you can judge for yourself. And that is enough: between a price stamped 264 days ago and a price with no date at all, the second is the more dangerous one, because it looks like today's price.
What we do about it
- Any price that has a date is shown with that date next to it — not just “fresh” or “old”, the actual date.
- Prices older than ten days are marked stale and listed below current ones.
- The “cheapest” badge never lands on a stale price. A cheap number that nobody has revisited is not a cheap price.
- Dates are always absolute, never “3 days ago”, because these pages get read months later.
What to do yourself
- Look for an “updated” line on the seller's page. If there isn't one, treat the price as undated rather than current.
- For anything priced off a currency or a metal, confirm an undated price by phone before ordering.
- A price far below everything else is usually not a current price — it is a forgotten one.
- If the date matters to you, check when the price was last read as well: a freshly read price at least tells you that is what the site said today.
The difference between “today's price” and a genuinely current one is unpacked in stale price vs current price, and how one product's price moves over time in product price history. On the published price pages, whatever date we have is printed under the price.
Method and limits
The count covers 2,590 prices across our 470 public price pages as of 21 August 2026, with ages measured against that date. We read Jalali dates, relative phrases like “2 days ago”, and ISO dates alike — but this line has no standard place on a page, so some shops may publish one where we didn't find it. 1.5% is a floor, not a ceiling. Digikala is also read from a search API rather than by opening its pages, so if a date exists there it would not appear in this count.