We tracked 996 live UK retailer prices across 51 of the most-bought products this week. Same product, same week - the gap between the cheapest and the typical retailer averages £70. On one 85-inch TV, it hits £400.

You’d walk ten minutes down the road if it would save you £70. So why don’t we do the same when shopping online?

We pulled live pricing for 51 of the products UK shoppers actually buy without thinking - the AirPods, the Apple Watch, the Dyson, the KitchenAid, the 65-inch TV - and compared every retailer stocking each one. Across 996 verified live listings at an average of 20 retailers per product, the gap between the cheapest UK shop and the typical UK shop comes out at £70 - 14.8% of what the typical shopper pays.

And with a price comparison site you don’t even need to do the ten-minute walk. You just check.

Methodology: we scraped per-retailer live prices from shopping.co.uk on 27 May 2026, kept only new + in-stock listings, excluded eBay auctions and small Shopify-hosted independent shops (where link reliability is poor), and HEAD-tested every cheapest offer to confirm the destination retailer page returns HTTP 200. We then compared each product’s cheapest UK retailer against the median retailer (the middle price across all retailers stocking that product). Median is used because one or two listings can sit far above the rest and a simple average would overstate the gap - we wanted the honest number, not the punchy one.

These are the products where picking the wrong retailer costs you the most in absolute pounds. Every cheapest link has been live-checked.

Two things worth flagging here. First: this is not a list of edge cases. These are the same products you’d put in your cart this weekend. Second: the typical column is the median of the retailers selling each one - it’s not the highest price. It’s what a UK shopper who picks any-old-retailer is likely to pay.

Live offers for the top three:

Pricing discipline varies wildly by category. Some manufacturers run a tight ship and every retailer charges roughly the same. Others let the market do whatever it wants. Here’s how the seven categories we tracked rank.

Wearables is the wild west. Apple Watch Series 11 alone has 54-64 retailers selling each variant in the UK, and prices stretch from £274 to £737 for the same watch. Across the seven smartwatches in our dataset, the gap averages £92 and never drops below 19%. If you buy a smartwatch without comparing, you are almost certainly overpaying.

TVs are the weirdest. The category-average overpay is 10% but the median is only 2% - meaning most TVs have surprisingly tight pricing across retailers, except for one or two with massive gaps (the QN70F 85" at 22%, the LG OLED B5 at 25%). The lesson: when buying a TV, you don’t need to compare 20 retailers. You just need to check three - and you’ll spot the outliers immediately.

Tablets and laptops are locked tight. Apple controls iPad pricing rigorously, so even with ten retailers selling the iPad Air 13", you’re only looking at a 5% gap or less. This is the one category where comparing isn’t worth much of your time. Buy it from whichever retailer you trust.

Brands with at least two products in our dataset:

Bose is the biggest offender by a long way. Every Bose product we checked had a 30%-plus gap between cheapest and typical retailer. The QC Ultra Headphones in black show up twice in this dataset (two listings for the same headphones in different packaging) and both have 30%+ gaps. If you’re buying anything from Bose, you should be comparing.

Apple is mid-table on average but home to the wildest individual products. iPads are locked at 5% or less. Apple Watches sit at 25-37%. AirPods Max are at 10-24% depending on colour. Within Apple, then, the answer is product-by-product: tablets fine, watches and headphones essential to compare.

Dyson, KitchenAid, Sony and Shark are the pricing disciplinarians. If you want a Dyson vacuum, a stand mixer in anything but red, or a Shark of any kind, you can pick the second-cheapest retailer and you’ll be within £15 of the lowest UK price. The exception is the KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer in Red - which somehow shows up £140 cheaper at AO.com than at the typical retailer, while all other colours of the same mixer sit within £12.

Rule 1: Always compare wearables and audio. No exceptions. Apple Watches show 25-37% gaps. Bose averages 31% across every product we tracked. Five minutes on a comparison site is worth £100+ here every time.

Rule 2: For TVs and big phones, check three retailers, then stop. Most cluster tight; the outliers stick out a mile. You don’t need to be thorough - you need to be alert. The Samsung QN70F is £400 cheaper at B&Q than the typical retailer; the LG OLED B5 is £270 cheaper at AO.com than typical. These are visible from the first comparison query.

Rule 3: Skip the comparison only on tablets, laptops, and most vacuums. Apple holds tablet pricing tight, and Dyson and Shark are similarly disciplined on cordless. Whichever retailer you’d shop with anyway is probably within £10 of the cheapest.

Rule 4: Stand mixers are sneakier than they look. The KitchenAid Artisan looks like a commodity product with set prices. It’s not - colour variants alone create a £140 swing between cheapest and typical retailer. Always check before buying anything in the £400-£600 kitchen-counter range.

If you bought one of each of our 51 products from whichever retailer happened to have it listed, you’d spend £25,219. If you bought every single one from the cheapest UK retailer, you’d spend £21,653.

That’s £3,565 of overpay across a one-of-each basket - 14.1% of the total. Buy everything blind and you don’t lose £70 per product. You lose enough to pay for a fortnight’s holiday.

Nobody buys 51 specific products in a row. But the per-product number tells you the rate. Anyone who buys ten consumer products a year - a few birthday and Christmas gifts, a fitness tracker, replacement headphones, a vacuum, a smaller kitchen appliance - is looking at £600-£800 of overpay annually at the rate we measured.

A few honest caveats.

This is the UK retailers we track. Shopping.co.uk indexes a wide spread of UK retailers including Amazon, AO.com, Argos, Currys, John Lewis, Very, Box.co.uk, Laptops Direct, Marks Electrical, B&Q, Boots and many others. It doesn’t include every UK retailer in existence, but it does cover the ones an ordinary online shopper would reach via Google or Amazon. The gaps we report are real for the typical shopper.

We excluded eBay auctions and small Shopify-hosted shops. eBay listings often look like the cheapest deal but are auctions that end, or buy-it-now listings that disappear within hours. Small Shopify-hosted independent retailers have similar link-reliability problems. Including either would inflate the headline saving but give readers links that often don’t work by the time they click. So we excluded both. Every retailer in this analysis sits on a major UK affiliate network with monitored offer feeds.

Prices change. The figures here were live on 27 May 2026 at 14:11 UK time. Retailers move pricing daily. Specific product prices may be different by the time you read this - but the rate of variation (the 14.8% average gap) is a steady feature of how UK consumer pricing actually works, not a single-day anomaly.

We compared against the median, not the most expensive retailer. If we’d compared cheapest vs most expensive, the average gap would be over £225 (34%). That’s a more dramatic number but a less honest one - almost nobody pays the highest price. We wanted to know what the typical shopper actually loses, so we used the typical price.

We excluded refurbished and used listings. All 996 prices are for brand-new, in-stock products. Refurbished gear can be a separate route to bigger savings but it’s a different category of purchase.

Buying things on the internet feels efficient. You searched, you found, you clicked, you ordered. Job done.

It is not job done. The shop you happen to land on through Google has no obligation to be the cheapest UK retailer - and across the 51 products we just measured, it almost certainly isn’t. The average gap is £70 per product. On a single TV in this dataset it’s £400. Those aren’t theoretical numbers. They’re what UK shoppers are paying right now.

The fix is roughly the easiest thing in modern consumer life: paste the product name into a comparison site, check the cheapest three, click through. Total time: maybe 90 seconds. Total saving: anything from “trivial” (a tablet, a Shark vacuum) to “pays for a long weekend” (a wearable, a TV, an espresso machine).

You’d walk ten minutes down the road for it. We’re saying don’t even walk.

How did you decide which products to include?
We picked products across seven categories where ordinary UK shoppers spend the most: audio, wearables, kitchen appliances, SIM-free phones, home/vacuums/cooling, tablets/laptops, and TVs/soundbars. Inside each category we picked recognisable, mainstream products from the brands an ordinary shopper would consider - Apple, Samsung, Sony, Bose, Dyson, KitchenAid, Ninja, Garmin, Fitbit, LG. We filtered out anything with fewer than 5 retailers stocking it to avoid edge cases.

Why use the median price and not the average?
A simple average is vulnerable to outliers - one rogue listing at twice the going rate would massively inflate the “average shopper” figure. The median (the middle price across all retailers) is robust to that. It’s a more honest answer to the question “what does the typical retailer charge?”

Why compare to the median and not the most expensive retailer?
Because almost nobody actually pays the most expensive retailer. The honest question is “how much does the typical shopper overpay?” - and that’s cheapest-vs-typical, not cheapest-vs-worst. If we’d compared cheapest vs most expensive, the headline gap would be roughly £225 per product, but it would describe a small fraction of actual UK buyers.

Why exclude eBay and Shopify listings?
Because the links die. eBay listings end. Buy-it-now listings disappear. Small Shopify-hosted independent shops often have stale offer feeds. The point of this analysis is to tell you where to actually buy something - so every listing in our dataset has been live-checked to confirm the destination retailer page is online and the product is available.

Are these prices really the same product?
Yes. We matched by variant ID - same SKU, same model, same colour, same storage. We didn’t compare a 128GB phone to a 256GB phone, or one Apple Watch case material to another. The 51 entries in the dataset are each a single specific variant.

Does this include contract phones or finance deals?
No. We excluded any product where the minimum price was under £50 and the maximum was over £500, because that pattern indicates a “free phone on a contract” listing distorting the cheapest figure. All the phone prices in the dataset are SIM-free.

Will the numbers be different next week?
Yes, slightly. Individual product prices shift daily. But the rate of overpay - 15-30% in most categories, 2-5% in the locked categories - is a steady feature of how UK retail competition works. Don’t expect it to vanish.