How far apart are Iranian prices? A report from 470 real searches
We publish a price page for every product our users search. We counted three months of them: the dearest seller of a product is typically 3× the cheapest, and buying the cheapest trustworthy offer lands about 41% below the middle of the market. The surprise is that stationery and building materials spread wider than phones do — and the reason is the unit, not the market.
Every time someone asks us the price of something, an anonymized version of that search is published as a public price page. Three months in, that has produced a dataset that is hard to find anywhere else: hundreds of real products that real people were actually pricing, each with a list of real sellers and what they charged that day. This post is a count of it.
- 470
- products searched
- 2,590
- real seller prices
- 3×
- median dearest-to-cheapest gap
- 41%
- median saving vs the middle price
Same product, three times the price
403 products carried at least three comparable prices. For the median one, the dearest seller asks 3× what the cheapest does. That is the middle of the distribution, not an outlier: a quarter of products came in under roughly 2×, and a quarter above 5×.
The more useful number is what buying the cheapest offer actually saves. Against the middle price for the same product, the cheapest trustworthy offer sits a median 41% lower — so someone who accepts the first ordinary-looking price usually pays close to double what the cheapest legitimate seller wanted. For a quarter of products that gap was under 21%; for another quarter it was over 63%.
And it pays to look past the first result: the gap between the cheapest offer and the second cheapest is a median 21%. Even when two sellers both look cheap, picking the wrong one costs a fifth of the money.
Which products spread the widest?
- Stationery & office21 products6.4
- Building materials30 products5.28
- Promotional goods5 products5.26
- Cleaning & consumables28 products2.93
- Car parts & oils43 products2.43
- Branded electronics34 products2.33
The driver is product identity, not seller competition. Something with a model number is the same item in every shop, so the prices have nowhere to hide. Something bought by a generic name can differ in weight, packaging, units per pack, or grade from one shop to the next — and then the price gap is really a product gap.
| Product | Cheapest | Dearest | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| MacBook M4 Pro, 48GB | 543,900,000 | 545,000,000 | 1.00× |
| Galaxy A36 256GB | 75,450,000 | 83,015,000 | 1.1× |
| Behran hydraulic oil 68 | 4,700,000 | 5,200,000 | 1.11× |
| Pride oil filter | 251,000 | 650,000 | 2.6× |
| Isuzu P700 air filter | 304,800 | 3,330,000 | 10.9× |
| Reception counter desk | 9,975,000 | 176,490,000 | 17.7× |
When cheap is not cheap
On 11 of those 403 products, the cheapest row sat more than eight times below the middle price. Almost none of them were bargains: “A4 paper” priced per ream next to prices per carton, bolts priced per piece next to prices per kilo, rebar priced per kilo next to prices per bar. That gives a rule that works on any site, not just ours: when a price is several times below everything else, check the unit of sale before you check the seller.
Two more findings from the same data that matter while shopping. First, 40 of the 2,590 prices (about 1.5%) were far enough from their market to be flagged as suspicious — usually a rial-versus-toman slip, or a different product's price sitting in the same page's markup. Second, in 45% of cases the cheapest row was not exactly the product asked for but a variant or a near match. That is why every row carries a match label rather than just a rank.
What the numbers mean in practice
- For branded, model-numbered goods, heavy shopping around barely pays — the real range is roughly 10-30%. Spend the effort on authenticity and warranty instead.
- For generic goods — paper, fasteners, cleaning supplies, materials — normalize the unit of sale before you compare prices. Otherwise you are comparing two different things.
- Look at the second cheapest too: it is a median 21% above the cheapest, which is not a rounding error on a bulk order.
- Don't discard a suspicious price, but don't build a decision on it either. Open the seller's page and read the unit.
You can run the same check on your own product: browse the published price pages, or if you have a long list, bulk price inquiry from a spreadsheet does this comparison for every row at once. The manual method is written up in our guide to online price comparison.
Method and limits
The figures come from our own public price pages as of 21 August 2026: 470 products and 2,590 prices, from searches that start in late May. Each product's prices are the snapshot of its most recent search. Prices flagged as suspicious are excluded from the spread figures, and products with fewer than three prices are excluded from them entirely. The product-type buckets are matched on words in the product name, so they are approximate. And most importantly: this is the set of things our users searched for, not a sample of the Iranian market — industrial and office supplies are over-represented compared with household shopping.