Why price comparison tools fail without unit normalization first

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Most price comparison tools sort listings by raw price, which produces misleading results when products differ in quantity or concentration. The real challenge is extracting unit counts from inconsistently formatted product titles and then normalizing prices to a comparable unit, such as cost per battery or per 100g. The problem deepens in categories like supplements, where a lower per-serving cost may reflect a weaker formulation rather than a better deal. Developer Arjun Mahadevan built Popgot, an API that pre-calculates unit pricing and value scores across retailers, to address this normalization gap. He argues the core issue is not data scraping but ensuring products are genuinely equivalent before any price comparison is made.

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