was-price and rebate fields

Pricing-context fields give a price its context. The current price alone says nothing about whether it is discounted; the was-price states what it replaced, and the rebate field records money back after purchase rather than at checkout.

In this catalog the pattern is documented on Newegg.com - Electronics Retail Product Catalog, whose short_description enumerates the per-item payload as one of 10 fields - "item number, title, price, was-price, rebate, stock, brand, model, rating and review count".

Two properties follow from that ordering. First, was-price and rebate sit inside the same per-item record as price and stock, so no join is needed to compute discount depth. Second, because they arrive in an embedded payload among 1,744 cataloged datasets, their presence is a property of the scrape, not of a documented schema.

Discount analytics fail quietly without these columns. A price series built only from the current price reads every promotion as a market movement, inflating volatility and corrupting any model trained on it.

• Was-price makes discount depth computable. With both prices in one Newegg record, the discount percentage is arithmetic; with only one, it is guesswork.

• Rebates are not discounts. Money back after purchase never appears in a listed price, so mixing rebate-inclusive and rebate-exclusive sources shifts comparisons by the rebate amount.

Verification is inexpensive here: 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and this source can be inspected before any budget is committed.

1. ('Confirm the was-price field exists before promising discount analytics.', "Newegg's short_description names 'price, was-price, rebate' explicitly - any retail source you license should be able to name its equivalent fields just as concretely.")

1. ('Decide how rebates enter your price basis.', 'A rebate is money back after purchase, listed beside price in the same Newegg record but never part of it - state which convention your pipeline uses.')

1. ('Check that context fields update with the price.', 'Across this catalog 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily; a stale was-price turns every ordinary repricing into a phantom discount.')

1. ('Verify field definitions against delivered files.', 'Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and embedded payloads deserve that check most because no schema document constrains them.')

See the term applied to real records: computer-electronics-retail data, consumer-electronics data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next:

• embedded-json-payload
• itemcell-object
• sku-product-record