90.2% of the 79,119 AliExpress listings we track changed price at least once in 40 days

We track the daily price of ~79k AliExpress listings ourselves (not the seller's crossed-out "was" price, our own reading, once a day). Wanted to share a number that surprised us even though we built the thing that measured it.

In the 40 days we've been recording, 71,382 of the 79,119 listings, 90.2%, changed price at least once. Not "went on sale," just: the number we recorded was different from the last time we checked. On a given day, around 2.5% of tracked listings are cheaper than our previous reading.

What this does not tell us, and I want to be upfront about it: we don't know why a price moved, repricing tool, real promo, restock at a different cost, currency rounding can all look the same in the data. We also haven't broken it down by category yet, and 40 days isn't long enough to know if this rate is normal or elevated by whatever promotional period fell inside that window.

The reason we're even measuring this: our whole project started from asking whether AliExpress's "-55% off!" badges mean anything (spoiler, mostly no, that's a separate rabbit hole). Turns out the underlying prices move around a lot regardless of what the badge says, which is its own separate, interesting fact.

Happy to share more of the raw breakdown if anyone wants to dig in, this is a side effect of daily scraping we do for a discount-verification tool, so we have a lot of exhaust data like this sitting around.