Same name, different price: the cross-store gap measured
How much do Pakistani online stores differ on listings sharing the same name?
Written from Dhundo’s own price data. Reviewed 2026-08-08; figures from the 2026-08-08 data snapshot.
This is the number a price-comparison site exists to produce, and almost nobody publishes it. Not a "save up to" headline, which is a marketing figure chosen from the tail of a distribution, but the typical distance between the cheapest and dearest price for one product across stores - measured, per category, with the sample size attached. Here it is for the Pakistani stores Dhundo reads.
The measurement
For each category, Dhundo samples the listings it has classified there, groups them by the leading significant words of their titles, and keeps the groups where the cheapest and the dearest listing come from different stores. The gap is the percentage by which the dearest exceeds the cheapest. Groups whose prices differ by more than a large multiple are discarded, because that is the signature of a title matching two different things rather than of a real price difference.
The typical gap is quoted, not the largest. A largest-gap figure is chosen from the tail of a distribution and tells you about the one outlier that survived; a median tells you what to expect on the next product you look up.
The results, by category
Beauty is where comparison pays best: 19 matched items with a typical gap of 33.3%. Small, identical, brand-coded products where none of the usual explanations for a price difference apply.
Fashion measures 46.4% across 8 matches and sport 55.2% across 4 - both high, and both to be read with suspicion, because in those categories matching titles frequently are not matching products.
Phones sit lowest, at 9.4% across 14 matches - and that low figure is the most trustworthy one here, because model numbers and storage sizes make phone matching reliable. Home measures 27.4% across 4 matches, and automotive 18.5% across 13.
Electronics returned no reliable matches at all in its sample, which is a result rather than a gap: store titles for laptops and televisions share too few leading words to pair.
What the pattern means
Two forces pull in opposite directions. Where a product is easy to identify, it is easy to compare - and easy comparison drives prices together, so the measured gap is small. Where a product is hard to identify, stores are competing less directly, and the measured gap is larger but partly illusory because some of those matches are not the same item.
The consequence is a genuinely useful rule. Comparison is most reliable where the gap is smallest, and most tempting where it is least trustworthy. Phones give you a modest saving you can be confident in; fashion shows a large gap you should check by eye before believing.
The other consequence is about effort. A gap is a percentage; what you save is a percentage of the price. A double-digit gap on something near the phone midpoint of Rs 15,490 is worth the two minutes it takes to check. The same percentage on a small fashion item near Rs 2,060 is not.
Where the biggest verified gaps were
In phones: Nothing Phone 4a Pro 12GB/256GB – Pink – PTA Approved, Rs 1,81,999 on Shophive against Rs 2,44,999 on AllMyTech - a gap of 34.6%.
In beauty: MAC MINI LADY DANGER 607 MATTE LIPSTICK, Rs 4,995 on Al-Fatah against Rs 7,499 on Shopon - 50.1%.
Both of these are matches carrying a model number or a shade code, which is the condition Dhundo requires before naming an example. A large gap on a vague title is not evidence of anything and is not quoted here, however good it would look.
How to check a gap yourself
Nothing here should be taken on trust, and it does not have to be. Open the product page for any item that shows more than one store. Each row names the store and the price Dhundo last read from it, and each row links to that store's own page.
Open two of them in two tabs. If the two prices still differ, the gap is real today. If they now agree, one of the stores repriced since we last read it, which is the ordinary way a measured gap disappears and the reason every figure here carries a date rather than a promise.
If the two pages are selling visibly different things - a different capacity, a different bundle, a refurbished unit - then the match was wrong and the gap was never real. That case is the one worth reporting; the contact page takes the two links and it is the fastest way to make the matcher better.
The corpus behind this guide, in numbers
Computed from stored listings. Snapshot taken 2026-08-08.
- Stored listings
- 3,16,326
- Stores with stored listings
- 124
- Stores Dhundo will search
- 139
- Listings sorted into a category
- 38,584
What this guide cannot tell you
It cannot tell you the gap across Pakistani retail. It measures the stores Dhundo has read, in the samples described, on data computed 2026-08-08.
It cannot fully separate a real price difference from two different products with similar names. The large-multiple guard removes the absurd cases; it cannot remove the plausible ones, and in fashion especially there will be some.
It cannot tell you that a gap will still be there tomorrow. Stores reprice, and a gap measured today is a reason to check both listings, not a promise.
Common questions
- Why not just advertise the biggest saving you found?
- Because it is the least representative number available. The biggest gap in any sample is the one most likely to be a matching error, and quoting it as what you will save would be the kind of claim this site exists to avoid. The typical gap is the honest headline.
- Which category is worth comparing in?
- On these numbers, beauty and phones - beauty because the gaps are large and the matches are reliable, phones because the matches are the most reliable of all even though the gaps are smaller. Electronics returned no reliable matches, so comparison there has to be done on specification by hand.
- How were these figures produced?
- By grouping sampled listings on the leading significant words of their titles, keeping groups whose cheapest and dearest come from different stores, discarding groups whose prices differ by more than a large multiple, and taking the median gap. Sample sizes are printed on each category page.