Where does the cheapest price actually come from? 439 real comparisons
Everyone has one favourite site they check first. Across 439 real products we counted where the cheapest price finally came from: Digikala 41%, Torob 28%, Emalls 22%, and the rest from shops none of those three listed. In other words, 59% of the time the cheapest price was somewhere you would not have looked first.
This question normally gets answered by instinct: one person swears Torob is always cheaper, another that it ends up being Digikala anyway. We search several sources at once and keep the result of every search, so we can replace the instinct with a count.
- 439
- products with 2+ usable prices
- 59%
- times the cheapest wasn't Digikala
- 607
- distinct shops in the results
- 21%
- median gap, cheapest to second
Which source produced the cheapest price?
- Digikala41
- Torob27.8
- Emalls21.6
- Shops found via Google7.1
- Divar2.3
The under-discussed part is that Digikala can only be cheapest when it stocks the item at all, and on 115 of 470 products (about a quarter) it returned nothing. Most of those are industrial supplies, office goods and spare parts — things sold by specialist shops rather than a general marketplace.
What if we dropped one source?
That is a sharper question than “which site is best”: if we removed one source, on how many products would the best price we could still find be more than 5% worse?
| Source | Products whose best price we'd lose |
|---|---|
| Digikala | 169 of 439 |
| Torob | 105 of 439 |
| Emalls | 86 of 439 |
| Shops found via Google | 30 of 439 |
| Divar | 10 of 439 |
The long tail of shops
Across these 470 products, the prices came from 607 distinct shop domains. 552 of them appear only once or twice in the whole set — meaning the overwhelming majority of shops holding a real price are shops you have never heard of. Outside the three big sites, the cheapest prices came from places like Basalam, Snappshop, Esam, Tapsi Shop, and dozens of specialist steel, network-hardware and tool retailers.
That is why we search Google results alongside the aggregators: on 31 products the cheapest price came from a shop none of the aggregators had listed. It is a small number, but it is consistently the products that cannot be found anywhere else.
One necessary warning
The cheapest row is not always exactly the product asked for: in 45% of cases it was a variant or a near match rather than an exact one. This is also the thing that is hardest to catch when clicking through several sites by hand, because every site writes its own title. Before ordering, check the seller page's title and specs against what you actually want — especially capacity, grade, units per pack, and whether a phone is registered.
- If you check only one site, your odds of having seen the cheapest price are roughly one in three.
- For everyday consumer goods a big marketplace is usually enough; for spare parts and industrial supplies it usually isn't.
- Look at the second cheapest as well: it is a median 21% higher, and sometimes it is the more credible seller.
- Read the price on the seller's own site, not on the aggregator's page. The aggregator's number is a scrape of that page, and it can be behind.
How the three platforms differ in kind is written up separately in Torob vs Digikala vs Emalls, and why the prices differ so much at all is in our price spread report. To see what one real search returns, the published price pages show this same data product by product.
Method and limits
The count is based on our own public price pages as of 21 August 2026. “Cheapest” follows the same rule the product itself uses for its badge: suspicious prices and stale prices don't qualify. Only the 439 products with at least two usable prices are counted. Note that Torob and Emalls are aggregators, so a price “from Torob” is really the price of a shop Torob listed, which we then read on the shop's own site. And as with every report from this set: these are our users' searches, not a sample of the market.