Our Takealot online price index tracked the official goods Consumer Price Index (CPI) between late 2022 and early 2023, before diverging substantially. As we discuss in our recent paper on e-commerce prices, one reason for this is that several product categories, particularly food and clothing and footwear, are very under-represented in the Takealot balanced sample compared to official CPI weights, while medicines, health products and beauty products, are over-represented in the Takealot sample we use. As we show in our paper, the moving averages of the two indices are correlated.
