Straight answers.

No. BuildCompare does not rank merchants based on commission. Results are ordered by price first (cheapest result wins the BEST PRICE badge), with secondary sort options for distance and combined price-and-distance. Affiliate relationships do not allow merchants to buy a better ranking in standard comparison results. Full details on the affiliate disclosure page.

Free during our pre-launch beta. Searching, comparing, and clicking through to merchants are anonymous and need no signup. A free account (rolling out soon) unlocks saved baskets, persistent settings across devices, and price-drop alerts. Long-term plan: affiliate-funded as the primary revenue path, with an optional Pro tier for power users if affiliate alone doesn't cover it. We'll give 30 days notice before anything about pricing changes.

Yes. When you search, we fetch current prices from each merchant. No pre-cache, no stale feed. The price you see is the price at the merchant's site at the moment you search.

We launched with seven UK merchants — Wickes, Screwfix, Toolstation, City Plumbing, Plumbing World, Buy Plumbing Online and MacDonald Plumbing — chosen for breadth of trade and DIY catalogue. More merchants are added each month based on requests from users. Email partnerships@buildcompare.co.uk to suggest a supplier.

No. You can search and click through to any merchant without an account. A free account (rolling out soon) unlocks: saved baskets, preferences (trade-prices toggle, distance limits, default sort), and price-drop alerts. Sign-in opens in waves — get on the early-access list on the homepage.

For merchants that expose live branch-level stock data, yes. Currently that's Wickes — once you've granted location permission, we'll show "14 in stock at Aylesford" or similar on the card. For other merchants we show site-wide stock if they expose it, or "stock not confirmed by merchant" if they don't.

Where a merchant runs a trade tier (Wickes TradePro, Screwfix Trade, Toolstation Pro, etc.), public-facing scraping returns the retail price. We show a "TradePro members may pay less" pill so you know to check your trade account at the merchant. Direct trade-tier pricing integration is on the roadmap — likely via the affiliate-network feeds we're applying to.

On-demand at search time, with a 5-minute cache per query (so a second user searching the same part within five minutes sees the cached result; after that, fresh fetch).

Not yet. UK trade and DIY supplies only. EU expansion (Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, Italy) is on the long-term roadmap but not before BuildCompare proves out in the UK.

We don't ask for personal data to search. Anonymous browsing is fully supported. When you sign up, we store only the minimum needed — email, hashed password, and your saved settings — on UK-friendly hosting. We never sell data, never share with third parties, never use behavioural advertising trackers. Full privacy policy at /privacy.html.

We respect robots.txt and rate-limit our fetches to be polite. If you'd prefer a structured product feed (it costs you less server load than us hitting your category pages), email partnerships@buildcompare.co.uk and we'll switch you to feed-based ingestion.