Information agency Finmarket, which is part of the Interfax group, together with the Development Center, a research institute of the Higher School of Economics, and Yandex.Market have launched a consolidated index showing price fluctuations in online stores.

The project, which has been named Internet Inflation, tracks price dynamics for 10 categories of goods that are popular among online store customers, and calculates the consolidated index on the basis of these prices. The goods include mobile phones; tablets; notebooks; digital cameras; televisions and plasma panels; refrigerators; slow cookers; watches; washing machines; hard disks and network drives. The number of categories will eventually be increased to 100 and more.

The most popular online goods were selected first, as the creators of the index reckon these will be the most representative. The project tracks real prices at which specific models are purchased. The popularity of the models is also measured. Official statistics do not currently hold such data as Russian Statistics Service specialists monitor price changes in stores, without observing specific models and their popularity. The new index will be calculated automatically, and data gathering is also automatic, so the index requires mainly computing capacity (currently the gathering and analysis of such information by official bodies requires the work of a huge number of people throughout the country).