A crossed-out price is an assertion about the past, and in Europe that assertion has to be true. When a seller announces a price reduction, the prior price he displays beside the new one must be the lowest price he himself applied during a reference period before the offer. It is not a recommended retail price, not what a competitor charges, not a figure chosen to make the saving look worthwhile, and not the price a single buyer paid for a day.
What exactly must a discount be measured against?
The mechanism is deliberately mechanical: take your own price history for that product, look back over the reference period the legislation defines, find the lowest price you charged in it, and announce from there. The consequence catches the oldest trick in online retail — list high for a few days, then discount for ever — because the high price never becomes the reference if it was never really the price. Whether a progressive reduction may be measured from the same original price, and how a product that has only just gone on sale is treated, are points where the national transpositions differ. Check the country, because the authority that would question you is national.
What the displayed price has to include
- All taxes, for a consumer. The price shown to a consumer is the total price including value added tax and any mandatory charge. Since the applicable rate follows the destination country, the same displayed figure does not give you the same margin in every market.
- The unit price, where the product is sold by measure. The price per unit of measurement is displayed next to the selling price so that packs of different sizes can be compared. Which products are concerned, and which are exempt, is set nationally and has to be checked per country.
- Delivery costs, before the consumer commits. They must be given before the order, and where they cannot be calculated in advance the consumer must be told that they will be payable. Discovering carriage at the last screen is a classic abandonment and a classic complaint.
- Nothing payable on the doorstep that was not announced. For goods shipped from outside the Union, duty and import tax collected on delivery turn into refused parcels and disputes. Either you price them in and clear the goods yourself, or you say plainly that they will be charged — silence is the option that costs.
- Any charge presented as optional that is not. A service pre-ticked in the basket, an insurance added by default or a fee that appears with the payment method are read as the price having been understated.
Notice who actually assembles that price. The figure a consumer sees is produced by a chain of systems — the shop, the feed sent to each marketplace, the comparison channels, the advertisements — and each of them can lag behind a change made in one of the others. A national authority looks at the page the consumer saw, not at the system you intended to be right, so a prior price left standing in one feed after the shop was corrected is the version you will have to explain. The companies that avoid this give the price for each country a single owner and a single source, and let every channel read from it rather than hold its own copy.
Why permanent strike-throughs and endless countdowns became a real risk
Because they are now checked, and checked by machine. A countdown that resets every morning, an offer that ends today and ended yesterday too, a stock counter that never reaches the bottom, a « last pieces » badge on an item held in volume: each of these is a false urgency, and false urgency is an unfair commercial practice independently of whether the price itself is good. A page can be visited repeatedly, archived and compared over time by anyone — a competitor, a consumer organisation, a national authority — and the evidence against a permanent promotion builds itself.
What it costs is rarely the fine alone. A national authority can order the practice to stop and publish the decision, which is indexed and read by your European buyers long afterwards. A marketplace can suppress the deal, remove the badge, or suspend the listing during its own review — in the middle of the season you built the promotion for. And the mechanics have to be rebuilt anyway, usually in a hurry, by the same team that is answering the authority.
How to build a promotional mechanic that holds
- Keep a price history per product and per country, dated, including the prices applied on marketplaces. Without it you cannot establish a prior price, and you cannot prove one either.
- Derive the announced prior price from that history automatically, rather than letting a marketing team type it. The field that can be typed is the field that will be wrong.
- Put real intervals at the normal price into the promotional calendar. A reference price only exists if the product actually sold at it, and a plan that never returns to full price has no reference to discount from.
- Make every countdown and every stock indicator correspond to something real, and let it reach its end. If the offer continues, it is not an offer that was ending.
- Keep the evidence: screenshots of the page, the price feed as it was sent to each channel, the dates. The question comes long after the campaign, and it is answered with records or not at all.
Some distinctions are worth keeping clear while you build this. An individual, targeted price offered to one customer is not the same object as an announced reduction addressed to everyone, and where a price has been personalised by automated decision-making the consumer has to be told. And a general claim about your price level — cheapest, unbeatable, below the market — is not a reduction announcement at all: it is a claim you must be able to substantiate, against evidence you hold, for the market and the period you made it in. Both get written by the same marketing team, and they fail for different reasons.
Before the next campaign, pull your own price history for the products you intend to discount, country by country and channel by channel, and see whether the prior price you were planning to cross out exists in it. If it does not, you have a choice to make now rather than an explanation to give later: raise the real price and hold it long enough to become the reference, or announce the offer without a crossed-out price at all. A promotion with no reference price is perfectly legal; a reference price with no promotion behind it is not.