About
Who runs Shop Bot, what the blog covers, how articles are researched and checked, and how to reach the people who write them.
What you are looking at is a working blog. Old pieces stay up in the archive rather than quietly disappearing, including the ones that have aged badly.
Shop Bot started as a private notebook. Somebody kept a record of what was worth the money and what was noise, and after a few years that notebook was more useful than most of what was published online.
We are not the right place for advice tailored to your exact situation. Shop Bot publishes general guidance, and the difference matters more than it sounds.
Each piece sits under exactly one heading. Readers arriving from search mostly land in prices and deals, shopping tools and safe shopping, so those sections get looked after first.
Hosting and research come out of the same pocket that buys the things we write about. That keeps the running costs honest and the pace slow.
We write from notes taken while doing the thing, not from a summary of other summaries. Where we are unsure, the page says so in plain words.
We buy what we write about. It is slower, it is more expensive, and it is the only arrangement that lets us say a thing was not worth it.
How claims get checked and how money is disclosed is written down separately, on the editorial policy page.
Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it, and every name links to a page listing everything else they have written.
Benedetta Krall, Price tracking analyst. Benedetta tracks prices as a hobby and keeps spreadsheets of what common items really cost through the year. She writes about price trackers, sales and deal alerts.
Caspian Mendez, Shopping tools reviewer. Caspian built browser extensions before he started reviewing them. He writes about shopping tools and bots, and always checks what permissions an extension asks for.
Hester Navarrete, Consumer protection writer. Hester worked in e-commerce customer service and handled thousands of returns and disputes. She writes about safe shopping, scams and getting your money back.
People ask about the name. There is rarely a good story behind a domain, and there is not one here either. Shop Bot was available, it was short enough to say out loud, and it has been the name long enough now that changing it would be more confusing than keeping it.
Point at the sentence. Write to [email protected] or use the contact page. Factual errors are fixed quickly, and when a correction changes the conclusion of a piece we say so at the foot of the page rather than editing quietly.
