How much the same product varies between independent retailers
A standing report from UponSale’s own dataset, recomputed every time this page loads.
This page is generated from our live database rather than written once and left to rot. Every figure below is the current state of our dataset at the moment you loaded this page.
The dataset
| Measure | Current value |
|---|---|
| Products tracked | 20,090 |
| Live offers compared | 16,282 |
| Independent retailers monitored | 12 |
| Price observations recorded | 23,631 |
| Categories covered | 339 |
| Longest continuous price history | 2 days |
Store-to-store spread
Among products carried by two or more of the retailers we track, the median gap between the cheapest and dearest offer is $68. Products sold by three or more stores — where a comparison is genuinely meaningful — number 4, averaging 1.0 stores each.
The practical reading: for a typical tracked product, choosing the wrong retailer costs more than most advertised discounts would have saved.
Advertised versus real discounts
We record both the discount a retailer claims and the discount we measure against the price a product actually sells for.
| Measure | Current value |
|---|---|
| Products where the claim overstates reality by 15+ points | 308 |
| Median overstatement, where one exists | 12.0% |
| Median real discount among genuinely discounted products | 0.0% |
| Products with a verified price change in the last 7 days | {{drops_7d}} |
Method
Prices come from retailers' publicly published product data, read at a polite rate. We match listings to a canonical product only when brand, model and every conflict-critical attribute agree — capacity, size, condition, region, voltage, pack count and bundle status. Spread is computed only across offers that pass freshness, stock and anomaly checks, so a stale listing or a suspected pricing error cannot widen it artificially.
Full detail is in our methodology, and the sources are listed on our data sources page.
Using these figures
You are welcome to cite any number here with attribution and a link. They change as the dataset grows, so quote the date you read them.
How to read the spread figure
The median spread is not a saving you are guaranteed. It is the middle of a distribution: for many products the gap is small, and for some it is very large. What it tells you is that on a typical tracked product, the choice of retailer is a bigger lever than the choice of week.
It is also a floor rather than a ceiling on the opportunity, for two reasons. It is computed only across offers that pass our freshness and anomaly checks, so genuine outliers that we could not corroborate are excluded. And it counts only products where we hold two or more stores — a product sold by one store we track may well be sold by five we do not.
What would move these numbers
More retailers. Every store we add creates new multi-store products, and the spread figure recomputes across a wider market.
More time. The real-discount figures depend on having enough history to know what a product normally sells for. Products with short history are excluded from that calculation entirely, so as history accumulates, the sample grows rather than the method changing.
Category mix. Spread behaves differently by category — spares and consumables cluster tightly, large equipment does not. A change in what we cover changes the median without anything changing in the market.
We state all three because a single headline number with no error bars is exactly the kind of statistic this site exists to be sceptical of.
Related reading
Every figure in this article is read from UponSale’s live measurements as the page loads, not typed in by hand — so it cannot drift out of date. Read how we measure or where the data comes from.