How We Track Prices & Score Cigars

We crawl 21 online cigar retailers once a day, starting at midnight Hawaii time. A crawl reads each retailer's own live product pages — the same pages a shopper sees — so the recorded price includes whatever sale was running at that moment. We do not take prices from feeds that a retailer controls the freshness of, and we do not accept submitted pricing.

Every price is also appended to a permanent history, which is what the price charts and the seven-day comparison draw on. Nothing is carried forward: when a listing goes out of stock it stops counting toward the best price immediately, rather than lingering as a phantom low that no one can actually buy.

Price per cigar (PPC) is the listed price of a pack divided by the exact number of cigars in it. A $90 box of 20 is $4.50 per cigar. A $45 five-pack of that same cigar is $9.00. Both are "the price" depending on who you ask, which is precisely why a raw price comparison between retailers is meaningless.

Every listing is normalized to PPC at the moment it is scraped, using the pack size printed on the retailer's own page rather than an assumption. Where a page does not state its pack size unambiguously, we skip the listing instead of guessing. That discipline costs us coverage — on one retailer it means dropping about 13% of listings — but a box mistakenly priced as a single cigar would surface as a spectacular fake deal and corrupt the comparison for that whole line.

A price comparison is only as honest as the listings it refuses. Four categories never reach the table:

• Out of stock. An unbuyable price is not a price.
• Mismatched formats. Singles and samplers are excluded from box-price comparison — a $12 single and a $6.30 box stick are not the same product.
• Unparseable pack sizes. If we cannot tell how many cigars are in the package, we skip it.
• Statistical outliers. Any listing more than 4x above, or below a quarter of, the median price for that cigar. At that distance it is almost always a parse error, not a bargain.

When the cheapest and dearest retailers for a cigar differ by more than 2.5x, we publish no savings figure for it at all. At that spread we trust our own guardrail more than we trust the data, and showing nothing is better than showing a number we doubt.

The savings percentage on a product is the gap between the dearest and cheapest in-stock retailer, as a share of the dearest price — what you save by buying at the best store instead of the worst. A cigar sold at only one retailer correctly shows 0%, not a discount. Across the catalog this figure typically lands near 29%.

Price trends compare today's best price against the best price from seven days ago, measured the same way on both dates so the comparison is like-for-like. If a cigar moves more than 50% down or 100% up in a week we suppress the trend rather than report it: in practice a swing that large is a pack-size parse being corrected, not the market moving.

CigarScore is one 0-10 rating combining published critic reviews with buyer ratings. It exists because critics do not share a scale: a 90 is routine at one publication and exceptional at another, and some score out of 5 or in letter grades. Four stages:

1. Calibrate. Each of our 18 critics is ranked against their own full body of reviews, so a score is judged relative to how that critic actually rates — not against a shared 100-point fiction.
2. Average. Critics review individual sizes; we track cigar lines. Multiple reviews from one critic are averaged, never cherry-picked — taking the best score any single size ever earned would flatter the most-reviewed cigars and nothing else.
3. Temper. The result is pulled toward the catalog average in proportion to how few critics weighed in, so one glowing review does not outrank five strong ones.
4. Blend. Buyer star ratings are folded in at 20% weight, once there are at least 10 of them.

Because of the tempering step, published scores cluster roughly between 5.2 and 8.3 rather than spanning the full 0-10. The tier labels are set from that real distribution, so "classic" means the top few percent of what we actually publish.

Roughly a fifth of the catalog has no professional review at all. For those we publish a Smoker Score, built from retailer customer ratings and always labelled as such rather than blended into the critic score.

Raw star averages are not usable directly: they are compressed and inflated, and every cigar would appear to outrank the acclaimed ones. So a cigar is ranked against the other rated cigars at that same retailer, retailers are combined by how much rating volume each contributes, and thinly-rated cigars are pulled toward the middle. The result lands inside the same range as critic scores, which is what makes the two comparable on one badge.

We do not sell cigars. Some outbound links to retailers are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you buy through them. That funds the site.

It does not affect ranking. The price table is sorted by price per cigar, so the retailer at the top is whichever is genuinely cheapest — several retailers we compare pay us nothing and still win that spot routinely. Scores are computed from reviews and ratings and cannot be bought. No retailer is given advance sight of this page, and none can pay to be added, removed, or reordered.

Every number here comes from parsing someone else's website, and websites change without warning. The most common failure is a pack size we read incorrectly, which is why so much of the methodology above is about refusing data rather than collecting it. Prices also move between our crawl and your click; the retailer's own page is always the authority at checkout.

If you spot a price or score that looks wrong, tell us and we will fix the parser rather than patch the row — [email protected].