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Basket of Goods (price comparison matrix)

The Basket of Goods (BoG) is a like-for-like price-comparison matrix you assemble by hand: rows are the items you care about, columns are suppliers, and each cell shows that supplier's price for the item. It is an analysis tool for comparing suppliers on a common basket — not a purchasing basket. There is no checkout, no order, and nothing is submitted to the platform.

Where a basket lives

Baskets are stored in your browser only (local storage), not on the server. You can keep several named baskets. This has direct consequences:

  • A basket is per-browser and per-device — it does not follow you to another machine or another browser.
  • Clearing browser data removes your baskets.
  • You can export a basket to JSON as a backup and import one back — but importing replaces all of your current baskets.

Building a basket

  • Add products from the catalogue grid (Add to basket) or from a product record. The first product you add auto-creates a basket named after the product's category and registers its supplier as a column.
  • Add supplier columns by typeahead search, and add rows (lines) with a common reference, description, range, and unit volume.
  • Each cell links a specific product to a specific supplier, so you can compare genuinely equivalent items.

The analysis view

Switch from Build to Analysis to turn the basket into a variance matrix:

  • For each line, the cheapest invoice price is highlighted.
  • Every supplier is shown as a variance % against that cheapest price (price ÷ cheapest × 100).
  • Extended figures multiply unit price by unit volume; lines are subtotalled by range with a grand total.
  • Export to Excel produces a formatted workbook of the matrix, grouped by range — this is the basket's "output", in place of any submit step.

Which price a cell shows

A cell resolves the supplier's price the same way the rest of PIM does: it prefers the basket's default zone, then the product's default zone, then any zone with a usable price; within the zone it takes the entry effective today, or the nearest future-dated entry if none is current, preferring invoice (group) price over list price. So a cell's price can change as prices become effective or expire, and changing the basket's default zone changes every cell.

Why does a cell change or go blank

  • Price changed with no edit — a future-dated price became effective, or the current one expired (see above).
  • Blank price (—) — the product has no usable price in any zone, or is price-on-application.
  • A column's products vanished — removing a supplier column strips that supplier's products from every line.
  • The whole basket reset — baskets are local-storage only; clearing storage, switching device, or importing a JSON file (which replaces all baskets) wipes them.

What it is not

  • Not a purchase order or ordering basket. Nothing is sent anywhere; the output is an Excel comparison.
  • Not the Price Comparison report, which compares price snapshots over time or an uploaded price file, server-side.