Two parts of a comparison get misread more than anything else on the site. Both are free features, both are showing you something true, and both look like something slightly different at a glance.
Your Cart
3 itemsTim Tam Original
200g
$3.50
vs Woolworths
Free Range Eggs
12pk
$6.20
vs Coles
Sourdough Loaf
680g
$4.50
vs Coles
"Close Match" means we are not certain it is the same item
Most comparisons on Grovena are exact. The products share a barcode, so they are demonstrably the same item and the price difference is the whole story.
A card labelled Close Match is doing something weaker. It is comparing similar but not identical products: a comparable substitute rather than the same thing. The label exists because the alternative was worse, since silently comparing a 400g jar against a 500g one produces a "saving" that is really a size difference.
So when you see it, check the names and sizes before treating the gap as a saving. Sometimes it is a genuine like-for-like in everything but the barcode. Sometimes it is a different product that happens to be adjacent.
The reason this comes up at all is that Aldi publishes no barcodes for its own-brand range, so there is no shared code to confirm two products are the same item. That is why the label appears more often on Aldi lines than on the other two.
Your cart saving is measured against the dearest option
The number in your cart is not the sum of the discounts, and that trips people up because it is usually larger than they expect rather than smaller.
Each item is measured against the most anyone is charging for it right now: the dearest supermarket selling it, or its own pre-special price, whichever is higher.
Worked through:
An item is $5 at Coles, down from $8. Woolworths has it at $9.
Your saving is $4 — the $9 you would have paid at the dearest shop, less the $5 you actually pay.
The $3 markdown is not added on top. A saving is counted once, not twice.
Whether that $8 was a real shelf price or a brief one is a question the price history chart answers.
The consequence worth noticing: you still save by picking the cheaper shop even when nothing is on special. A cart of full-price items bought at the cheapest of three chains has a real saving, and a discount-only figure would show zero for it.
What gets left out
Two exclusions, both deliberate:
- Comparisons between different pack sizes. Where the two shops' unit prices imply the packs are not the same size, that comparison is skipped — a 500g jar against a 1kg one produces a "saving" that is really a size difference. The item itself still counts: it keeps its own markdown and any comparison against a genuinely comparable pack.
- Close matches are counted, but flagged. Where the comparison is against a close match rather than the identical product, the line says so — so you can see which part of the total rests on a judgement call.
- The same product twice. A cart can hold the Coles version and the Woolworths version of one item. Only the cheaper line is measured against the other, because paying both a saving for beating the other would invent money for a choice you did not make. The dearer line keeps its own markdown.
Unit prices on loose fruit and veg
Loose produce is where the shops disagree most about how to quote a price. Coles and Aldi price a loose tomato by the kilo and tell you roughly what one weighs; Woolworths prices it by the piece and does not publish a weight at all. Three prices, two of them per kilogram and one per tomato, is not a comparison.
So where a shop gives no weight, we borrow one. The piece weight another shop states for the same produce is used to work out a per-kilogram figure, and it is marked with a ≈ so you can see which number is ours rather than the shop's. Hover it and it names the weight it used.
Two things worth knowing about that figure:
- It rests on an assumption, which is that a tomato is a tomato. That is fair for loose produce and it is why we do it there and nowhere else — never on packaged goods, where the pack size is the whole question.
- Where the shops disagree about the weight, there is no figure. Coles calls a navel orange 250g and Aldi calls it 180g; rather than split the difference and quote something neither shop said, we show nothing.
The price above it is always the shop's own. Only the per-kilogram line is ours.
The prices themselves are a snapshot
Worth stating once, because it applies to every number above. A price here comes from our last refresh, read from each retailer's own public online store. That refresh runs weekly, on Wednesday mornings, with Aldi refreshed again on the weekend, and fruit and veg every day — produce moves mid-week where packaged groceries mostly do not.
Prices change often, they vary by store and region, and member pricing can differ again. Treat everything here as a guide for deciding where to shop, and confirm at the retailer before you buy.
More of this kind of question is answered on the FAQs.