The Seoul Receipt — our sourcing standard
Most stores show you a price crossed out and a smaller one beside it. You have no way to know whether the first number was ever real. The Seoul Receipt is our answer: for a product that carries one, we print what it costs on the shelf in Seoul, what we add, and what you pay — and we name the Korean storefront we read the price from, so you can go and check it.
The rule, in five clauses
- Every receipt names its source. The Korean price comes from the brand's own Korean storefront, pinned by channel id, with the Korean product title recorded alongside it. A price with no source is not a receipt.
- The Korean price is re-read at publish time. It is never copied forward from a note or a spreadsheet. A stale price is a wrong price.
- Three lines, no rounding in our favour. Seoul shelf price, our sourcing and handling, your total. Nothing else goes in the sum.
- If our price falls below our honest landed cost, we withhold the receipt. We do not adjust the arithmetic to make it fit. The receipt disappears; the product stays.
- No "compare at" theatre. We do not invent a higher former price to discount from.
Where it stands today
4 products carry a verified Seoul Receipt right now. That is a small number and we are not going to dress it up: a receipt requires a human to pin the exact Korean listing, and an automated matcher already proved it cannot be trusted to do it — it matched the wrong pack size four times out of four. So the number grows at the speed a person can verify it, and we would rather publish four we can defend than three thousand we cannot.
What we have withheld
Clause 4 has teeth, and here is the evidence. These products are on sale normally. They simply do not carry a receipt, because printing one would have meant printing a number that flattered us:
- Torriden DIVE-IN Serum — priced S$22.90 against a landed floor of S$25.53. Withheld.
- MEDIHEAL — short of its floor by S$0.22. Twenty-two cents, and it is still withheld, because a rule you bend for small amounts is not a rule.
- d'Alba — below its floor even before any freight is counted. Withheld.
An awards page publishes its winners. A standard publishes what it refused.
How to check us
Clause 5 is the easiest to falsify and we would rather you tried. Open any
product on this store and add .json to its address. Look at
compare_at_price. If we were inflating a former price to discount
from, it would be there.