Guide
SA Hardware Price Index
Median ZAR prices tracked daily across our own catalogue, published as a citable dataset.
What is measured
After each supplier feed run and once daily, the price and stock state of every listed SKU is appended to an immutable snapshot table. Nightly rollups produce 7-, 30-, 90-, 180- and 365-day minimum, maximum and average, percentile rank, distance from the 90-day peak and volatility.
How a verdict is decided
A product is marked a good buying time only when its current price is at least two per cent below the 30-day average and inside the lowest quartile of the last 180 days. A product in the top quartile is marked as a wait.
Cold-start honesty: until a SKU has fourteen snapshots we show "tracking since" the first observation and no verdict at all.
Snapshots are append-only. A corrected observation is written as a new record with its reason attached rather than overwriting the old one, which is what makes the series auditable back to its first day.
Reuse
The dataset is published under CC BY 4.0 with the method stated on this page, and served through a keyed, rate-limited API so a citation can be checked rather than asserted.
Related pages
- Delivery & Lead Times — Courier bands, cut-off times and what "in stock" actually means on this site.
- Returns & RMA — 14-day returns and self-service RMA with a published response SLA.
- Price Match & Price Lock — How price match works, what we will beat and how long we hold a price.
- About HardwareHQ — Who we are, where we are based and how we handle orders and support.