Cross-Store Compare
Same product, different price. The gap moves around more than you’d think, and it’s rarely the same store winning twice.
What HAULS actually checked
Not “a similar item.” The same one, confirmed.
A phone case at ₹899 on one platform, the identical listing at ₹649 on another, shown only once HAULS is confident it’s really the same product, not just a similar one.
Why this matters
Everyone knows prices differ. Knowing it’s the same product is the hard part.
For identical products sold in the same market, prices can vary by around 19 to 20% just by store, and it’s rarely the same store that’s cheapest every time. The gap moves around more than most shoppers expect.Kaplan & Menzio, NBER
In a US survey, shoppers researching a purchase over $500 spent an average of 79 days gathering information and comparing prices before buying, and more than 80% started that research online.GE Capital, 2013
Researchers building product-matching datasets found ordinary “similar item” listings hard to tell apart from genuine matches, close enough that they had to create separate categories just to train systems to spot the difference. Confidently matching the same product across two stores is a harder problem than it looks.ProMap, 2023
The FTC has already caught a comparison-shopping site secretly taking payment to move a listing into the “best” ranking slot, while presenting that ranking to shoppers as objective.FTC, 2020
In a survey of about 19,000 Indian online shoppers, 56% wanted AI help comparing products and prices, and 68% wanted help checking whether a product or seller is genuine. Most people already find this tedious enough to want automated help.LocalCircles, 2025