Evidence hierarchy
We use four clearly recorded evidence tiers. Direct manufacturer submissions supplied for an assessment have the highest priority and are labelled as submitted data. Public manufacturer sources follow, then retailers and price portals, then other suitable web sources. A higher-tier source prevails when sources conflict; warranty conflicts are resolved conservatively.
What is recorded
Each scored claim is stored with a source URL, retrieval date and a relevant excerpt. Product identity, the exact variant, at least one verified EU price and all mandatory gates must be confirmed before the product can qualify. One documented EU price is sufficient; manufacturer-only availability is not penalised. The lowest documented EU market price establishes the price class.
Responsible collection
We prefer manufacturer primary sources, licensed catalogues and official APIs. Public retailer, marketplace and price-portal pages may be consulted in a targeted, low-volume manner to verify an individual product or price. We do not operate bulk crawlers against those services, circumvent technical protection measures or ignore access restrictions. Temporary fetched-page copies are deleted after 30 days.
Direct manufacturer submissions—including information about products not yet publicly released—are stored separately, clearly labelled and given priority over web evidence. The submitting company is responsible for their accuracy.
The category benchmark itself is versioned and records its market references, price-class boundaries and calibration notes. smartzone.de may be used internally as a validation sample but is never a scoring source or benchmark source.
Where research also involves business contact data of manufacturer representatives, the Privacy Policy applies, including the right to object to direct marketing at any time.