How we source product data

Every refrigerator, freezer, ice maker, beverage center, wine cooler, and kegerator on Fridge.com is anchored to a permanent Fridge.com Identification Number (FIN). The FIN is the canonical key that links the same physical model across every retailer that sells it. The format is FIN-0042893 and once assigned it never changes.

Data flows into the FIN from three categories of source:

• Manufacturer sources. EPA Energy Star certifications (lab-tested, not self-reported) and manufacturer spec sheets, owner's manuals, and energy guides discovered from each brand's site.
• Retailer sources. Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe's, Walmart, and AJ Madison. Each retailer assigns its own SKU; the FIN binds those SKUs together.
• Federal safety sources. CPSC.gov recall data, swept daily across every tracked product.

NEW units only

Fridge.com does not track or display used, refurbished, open-box, scratch-and-dent, or pre-owned products. Period. This is a non-negotiable rule baked into ingestion: a product's condition must be NEW or it never enters the database. Pricing collected from retailers is filtered to NEW-condition listings only. Customer reviews that explicitly describe a used, refurbished, or open-box unit are filtered out automatically. The price-history charts on Fridge.com show only NEW-condition prices, which is why our numbers can disagree with sites that mix NEW and used inventory.

Real or hidden — never fake

Sections on a product page render only when there is real backing data behind them. Fridge.com never shows a “be the first to review!” placeholder, an empty star rating, a skeleton chart that never resolves, a fake author byline, or a generated-on-the-fly testimonial. If we do not have real customer reviews for a product, the customer-reviews section does not exist. If we do not have a price history, the price-history chart does not exist. If we do not have an Energy Star certification on file, we do not display an Energy Star badge.

Cross-retailer pricing

Current prices for each FIN are aggregated across retailers via Google Shopping snapshots collected through SearchAPI. The cross-retailer pricing widget on each product page surfaces the lowest current NEW-condition price and ranks tier-1 retailers (Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe's, Walmart, AJ Madison) first. Snapshots refresh on a weekly cadence for Tier S and Tier A products — the high-volume and high-interest catalog — and on a slower cadence for the long tail. Prices are stored as point-in-time snapshots, not live API calls during page render, so the page you see is always served from our database.

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are aggregated across the retailers that sell each FIN — Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe's, Walmart, AJ Madison, and the manufacturer's own site where available. Reviews are stored verbatim; we do not paraphrase them and we do not use AI to rewrite them. Each review is displayed alongside the source retailer it came from, so you can always see which store the buyer wrote on. Verified-buyer attribution is preserved when the source retailer publishes it. Reviews that reference a used, refurbished, or open-box unit are filtered out at ingestion per the NEW-only rule.

Recall safety

CPSC.gov is the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Its public recall feed is swept daily across every tracked product. When an active recall exists for a FIN, a recall banner is rendered above the customer-reviews section on the product page, with the CPSC notice number, the affected manufacturer model range, the hazard, and a link to the official CPSC page. Affiliate purchase CTAs are visually de-emphasized on any product page where an active recall exists — buying a recalled unit is the wrong outcome and the page is laid out accordingly.

Updates and freshness

Different data has different update cadences, and we are explicit about each:

• Recall sweeps: daily, against the full CPSC.gov feed.
• Cross-retailer price snapshots: weekly for Tier S and Tier A products; monthly for the long tail.
• Customer review captures: weekly for the Tier S top 100; monthly for the next 900; quarterly for the remainder.
• Manufacturer specifications and PDFs: quarterly, with re-discovery on every product addition.
• Amazon NEW-condition price history: nightly, sourced via Keepa.

Each FIN's last-updated timestamp is exposed in the page's schema.org dateModified field and in the HTTP Last-Modified response header so AI assistants and search engines can weight content freshness correctly.

For the full list of upstream feeds and APIs that power each part of the site, see Data Sources.