Hi it's Wassim from Burger Index, 

On this week's BI Insights we looked at one of the hardest problems in grocery competitive intelligence:

How do you compare price when the products across two platforms aren't exactly the same?

For grocery and q-commerce teams, product matching sounds straightforward. Find the same product on a competitor, match it, and compare the price. In reality, grocery catalogues are messy.

The same product can have different names, descriptions, pack formats, images or units across platforms. Barcodes may be unavailable. And sometimes the exact same product simply isn't sold by the competitor.

This creates a problem: if you only analyse exact matches, a large part of the competitor's assortment disappears from your comparison.

To see how we can solve this, we compared HappyFresh and Segari in Jakarta, Indonesia, first using exact product matches and then finding comparable alternatives where exact matches don't exist.

Exact matching: start with the same products

The cleanest comparison is where we can identify the exact same product on both platforms.

Across a basket of 15 exact matches, the HappyFresh basket costs Rp433,000, compared with Rp420,300 on Segari.

Similar matching: compare the alternative

The attached comparison shows a basket of five products where exact equivalents don't exist across HappyFresh and Segari.

Rather than leaving them unmatched, we find comparable alternatives.

This distinction is important.

A 250g product cannot be fairly compared with a 400g alternative based on shelf price alone. Normalising the comparison to price per gram, millilitre or unit makes products with different pack sizes comparable.

Now the unmatched part of the catalogue can still contribute to the affordability analysis.

What this means

Grocery competitive intelligence shouldn't stop when products don't match.

The real challenge is creating enough structure around messy product data to understand what is identical, what is comparable and what is genuinely different.

Burger Index extracts grocery catalogues across web and app platforms, enriches product attributes, standardises taxonomy and uses barcode, exact and similar matching to connect products across competitors.

That means teams can benchmark pricing and assortment even when competitor catalogues don't line up perfectly.

👉 Book a demo at burgerindex.com to see how it looks live in your market