Why we are not publishing a Black Friday 2026 price index

We announced a Black Friday 2026 price index that would record product prices at large online retailers in Romania. We are not going to publish it. This article explains why and what you can do instead.

Why the index was not possible

An index needs the same product pages to be read on a schedule over several weeks. The large retailers' sites refuse automated access: the checks fail instead of returning a price.

OmniWatchGuard respects robots.txt and does not bypass anti-bot protection. We did not want to change that for this project, so we dropped the index instead of publishing partial or unreliable figures.

What this means for OmniWatchGuard users

Price and stock monitoring works on sites that allow automated access. If a site refuses it, the check fails and you are told. Large retailers that block automated access cannot be monitored.

What you can do instead

• Watch your own prices: monitor your own product pages with a price monitor and a threshold alert.
• Watch competitor pages that allow automated access, in the same way.
• Know the 30-day rule: when a seller announces a price reduction, it must show the lowest price applied in the 30 days before the reduction.
• Keep your own record: check the pages you care about yourself on set dates before the event, and write down the price and the date.

Each of these points is explained in the Black Friday 2026 price guide. For buyers, see also how to check if a discount is real.