If you run “was £50, now £30” sale pricing anywhere on your site, it’s worth five minutes to check it holds up. The rules around discount pricing have tightened, and the standard being applied now is stricter than most retailers realise.
The body responsible for this is the Competition and Markets Authority, the UK’s consumer and competition regulator. Think of them as the ones who step in when a business’s pricing or sales claims mislead shoppers. They’ve recently gained stronger powers to act on this directly, rather than needing a lengthy court case first, and they’ve been using them. Several major online retailers have already had to change how they present discounts after being challenged.
None of this is really about big brands, though. The standard applies just as much to a small independent store as it does to a national chain. So it’s worth checking your own pricing against it, even if you’ve never given it a second thought.
What actually gets flagged
The core issue is simple: a discount has to be a genuine discount. If you’re showing a customer a saving, that saving needs to be real, not just a number designed to make the current price look better.
In practice, this usually comes down to a few things:
Your “was” price should be a price you actually charged, and recently, not a price plucked out of the air to make today’s price look like more of a bargain. If a customer could reasonably ask “was it really that price?”, you should be able to answer yes with evidence.
Your discount percentage needs to match the maths. A “50% off” claim should mean the current price really is half the previous one, not an approximate or rounded-up figure.
A sale should actually end. If a “limited time only” banner has been up for six months, or a countdown timer resets every time it hits zero, that’s the kind of thing that draws attention. Urgency messaging only works, and only stays legal, when the urgency is real.
Products shouldn’t be permanently “on sale” against an inflated reference price. If an item has been sitting at the same “discounted” price for a long time, the original “full price” starts to look invented rather than genuine.
How to check your own store
You don’t need a compliance department to get this right. A useful exercise is to pick a handful of your best-selling or most-discounted products and ask, for each one: what was this actually selling for a month ago? Two months ago? Do I have a record of that? If the honest answer is “I’m not sure” or “it’s always been discounted,” that’s worth adjusting before it becomes a problem.
It also helps to build a habit of keeping a simple pricing log, even something as basic as a spreadsheet noting the date and price whenever you change it. That way, if a “was” price is ever questioned, you have something to point to.
For anything running as a timed promotion, whether that’s a bank holiday sale or a countdown banner, make sure the end date is real and that the offer actually stops when it says it will.
Why it’s worth the effort
None of this is about pricing less competitively or running fewer promotions. Genuine sales and discounts are still one of the most effective ways to bring in customers. The difference is making sure what’s advertised is what’s actually true, so that trust holds up if a customer, or the regulator, ever looks closely.
Getting this right protects you two ways: it keeps you clear of enforcement action, and it means customers can trust your prices at face value, which matters just as much for repeat business as it does for compliance.
Further reading
Using urgency and price reduction claims online (CMA open letter):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/using-urgency-and-price-reduction-claims-online
The letter itself, and the accompanying examples document, lay out exactly what the CMA considers non-compliant, with more detail than a blog post can cover.
