The Three-Tier Rule
Every buying guide on Elan's Best names exactly three picks: a budget pick, a best-value pick and a premium pick, and the tiers are relative to that category rather than fixed dollar amounts.
A budget mechanical keyboard and a budget monitor sit at very different prices. Tiers describe where a product sits inside its own category, so the budget pick is the cheapest thing we would still tell a friend to buy, the best-value pick is what most people should actually get, and the premium pick is the point where more money stops buying much more product. If a category has no honest trio, we do not publish a guide for it.
The Typical-Price Test
A discount only counts as a real sale on Elan's Best when the current price is below the median of our own tracked price snapshots, not when it is below the manufacturer list price.
List price is close to meaningless on most marketplace listings: items sit permanently at "40% off" a number nobody ever paid. We compare against the median of the prices we have actually recorded for that product, so a sale badge means the thing is genuinely cheaper than it usually is. A price at or within one percent of the lowest figure we have ever recorded is flagged as a tracked low.
The Weekly Check
Elan's Best re-checks the price of every product it tracks once a week and stores the result, so every price on the site carries the date it was taken.
The snapshots are committed to the site as data rather than fetched from a third party at page load, which is why price history stays available even if an upstream source disappears. Every price on the site is a dated observation, not a live quote, and the retailer link always carries the true current number.
The Buy-Box Rule
A product only stays listed on Elan's Best while it has a live buy box from the retailer, so items that quietly become third-party-only or unbuyable are pulled instead of left up.
Dead affiliate listings are the standard failure mode of recommendation sites. We treat the missing buy box, not the page returning an error, as the signal, because an unbuyable listing usually still returns a perfectly healthy page. Items that fail the check go to a replacement worklist rather than staying in a guide.
The Three-Strike Listing Check
Elan's Best only removes a product as dead after its listing fails three separate checks, because single failures are usually transient.
One failed request is noise: retailers rate-limit, and pages flap. Three confirmed failures is a removed product. This keeps the catalog from churning on temporary errors while still clearing genuinely dead listings.
No Paid Placement
No brand can pay for a pick, a position or a rating on Elan's Best; the only money the site makes is affiliate commission on links a reader chooses to click.
Commission rates differ between products, so the incentive to bias a ranking is real. The rule is simply that rankings are set before commissions are considered, and a pick is never changed because of what it pays. Affiliate disclosure appears on every page that carries a link.
One Named Reviewer
Every review, rating and verdict on Elan's Best is written by one named person, Elan Harpaz, rather than published under an anonymous house byline.
Ratings are given on a 1 to 10 scale and represent a single editorial verdict, not an average of many reviewers. Star ratings that come from a retailer listing are always labelled as the retailer's, shown separately, and deliberately kept out of our structured data.