Labs · Source readiness

OECPI — Online Essentials Consumer Price Index

Source research for a possible matched-product online price study of essential household goods in Venezuela. It is not an official CPI replacement.

Source readiness only

No numeric OECPI is currently published.

Farmatodo has a live item collector, but its archived pilot did not pass continuity gates. No source path is approved to produce an OECPI observation or score.

Current source state

Farmatodo

A live item collector exists. The archived pilot did not pass continuity gates, so its evidence remains source research rather than an OECPI observation.

Mercado Libre Venezuela

Archive feasibility is promising, but a production collection path is not approved.

Locatel

Candidate public catalog; no OECPI collector is wired.

Gama

Candidate public catalog; no OECPI collector is wired.

What a future study would measure

OECPI would ask how the prices of the same essential products change online. Any future version must use exact product identities and price relatives for products observed on both dates. It cannot treat a change in availability or an aggregate basket sum as inflation.

Methodology guardrails

1. Exact products: use positive, available item-level prices from a documented collector.
2. Real continuity: establish enough repeated product overlap before an index can begin.
3. Transparent movement: document the comparison formula and every source input before publication.
4. Honest gaps: omit thin periods. There is no substitution, interpolation, carry-forward, quality adjustment, or archive splice.

Farmatodo source context

The existing Farmatodo collector supplies a real aggregate basket-cost history, shown below for context. It is an availability-sensitive sum—not OECPI—and is never used to backfill or infer an index.

Observed date	Raw basket cost	Treatment
2026-10-02	169,016.1 VES	Source context only
2026-10-01	163,708.1 VES	Source context only
2026-09-30	169,095.1 VES	Source context only
2026-09-29	168,826.1 VES	Source context only
2026-09-28	169,003.1 VES	Source context only

The archived pilot remains valuable source research, but it failed the continuity gates required for a consumer-price index. Those captures remain evidence, not backfilled OECPI.

No historical base is claimed

A historical base would imply exact-product observations that do not exist. A future multi-retailer study can begin only across real, documented overlap periods; it cannot manufacture a 2012 history or splice archives into a score.

What would change this status

A production path would need a named, re-runnable collector, stable product identities, sufficient real overlap, recorded methodology, and a separate provenance and governance review. Until then, OECPI remains source research only and outside Core VCI.