Why is price comparison still so bad in 2026?

[YourPriceHub]

I’ve been thinking a lot about how surprisingly difficult it still is to compare prices across major online stores. Even in 2026, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco, and dozens of others all show different prices, different discounts, and different stock levels.

Google Shopping is incomplete, browser extensions feel heavy, and most comparison sites are full of ads or outdated data.

Why is this still such a hard problem? Is it technical, legal, business incentives, or something else?

I’ve been experimenting with my own approach to this problem here: https://yourpricehub.com — but I’m curious how others think about the broader challenge.

Would love to hear perspectives from people who’ve worked in e‑commerce, scraping, or pricing systems.

[GianFabien]

From a technical perspective: prices change constantly; prices are inconsistently expressed and the volume of products is massive. Scrapping the volume of data required and then processing it and updating it is a substantially difficult task.

From a business point of view an independent operation would require a very large investment. To recoup at least part of that requires advertising and affiliate revenue which in turn creates perverse incentives.

[YourPriceHub]

That is a good point because there are so many products all over web and would need a huge search to find even a small amount of Google. Thanks for your feedback!