Benchmarking your prices against rivals

Why most price checks mislead

The usual price check is someone opening a rival's site, finding a similar product and noting that it is cheaper or dearer. That tells you very little. The product may differ in size, specification or bundle. The rival may charge more for delivery. They may be mid-promotion. And nobody wrote down the date, so the next check cannot be compared with this one.

A benchmark fixes those problems with a little structure: fixed baskets, a total-cost view, a record of promotions and a date on every row.

Building like-for-like baskets

A basket is a small set of products that a real customer might buy together, defined so you can find the equivalent at each rival.

1. Pick three to five baskets that reflect how people buy from you: a single best-seller, a typical first order, a larger repeat order, and one item where you suspect you are expensive.
2. For each item, write down the attributes that make it comparable: size, quantity, material, specification, brand if it is a branded product.
3. Find the closest match at each rival. Where there is no true match, note the nearest alternative and how it differs. Do not force a comparison that a customer would not make.
4. Keep the baskets fixed between checks so the trend is meaningful. Add a new basket rather than editing an old one.

A worked example: a homeware shop defines a “first order” basket of one large candle and one diffuser. Rival A sells the same sizes; Rival B only sells the candle in a smaller size. The notes say so, and the Rival B row is marked as a loose match rather than quietly treated as equal.

For own-brand products, like for like is harder. Compare on the attributes a customer cares about and mark the row as a loose match where it is one.

Delivery and fees in the total

Customers compare what they pay, not what the product page says. For each basket at each rival, record:

• Product prices
• Standard delivery charge for that basket value
• The free delivery threshold, and whether the basket clears it
• Any fees added at checkout (service, small order, payment or booking fees)
• The total at the last step before payment

Free delivery thresholds deserve their own column, because they shape basket size. If a rival's threshold sits just above your typical order value, they may be nudging customers to add an item. The shipping threshold tool helps you test where your own threshold should sit.

Your own pricing has to meet the rules here too. The CMA's price transparency guidance, CMA209, published 18 November 2025, covers including mandatory fees, taxes and charges in the headline price, and addresses drip pricing (charges added as a consumer proceeds) and partitioned pricing (gov.uk). If your benchmark shows you add a fee late in checkout, read the guidance before you change anything else.

Discount depth and frequency

A rival who is cheaper on a given date may be running a sale. To see their real strategy, track promotions over time:

• Depth: how much off, and on what (sitewide, category, single products, first order only)
• Frequency: how often a promotion is running when you check
• Mechanic: percentage off, money off, multi-buy, free gift, free delivery
• Triggers: whether offers cluster around seasonal peaks such as the November sales period, or appear to be always on

A brand that is permanently on promotion has trained its customers to wait for a code. A brand that rarely discounts but runs deep, short events is doing something different. Neither tells you what you should do, but both tell you what customers in your category are used to. The discount designer helps you think through the margin effect of an offer before you copy one.

Use structured data, and record dates

Many shops publish product prices in structured data (JSON-LD) on the product page, which is what search engines read. Checking it is a neat way to confirm a price and currency without relying on what the page design shows, and it sometimes reveals a sale price and a regular price side by side. Our JSON-LD tool shows you what a page publishes. Check your own pages too: a mismatch between the visible price and the structured price is worth fixing.

Every row in your benchmark needs a date, and ideally a screenshot or saved copy of the page. Prices change, and a comparison without dates cannot be repeated, defended or used to spot a change. Keep the sheet simple: date, rival, basket, item, price, delivery, fees, total, promotion running, notes.

If you advertise a price comparison

Saying you are cheaper than a named or identifiable rival is a comparative claim, and the CAP Code applies. Rule 3.33 requires that you compare products meeting the same needs or intended for the same purpose; rule 3.34 requires an objective comparison of material, relevant, verifiable and representative features, which may include price (CAP Code section 3).

In practice: keep the dated evidence behind any price claim, check the baskets are equivalent, include delivery if it changes the answer, and stop running the claim when the rival's prices move. A benchmark used internally, to set prices and thresholds, carries none of that burden.