Hey all,
I was just looking at stock for the Ryzen 9 3900X on PCPartPicker and they crawled a retailer's site both yesterday and today and the price history was £535.99 on both occasions. However now the retailer is saying "Was £557.65, Now £551.99". Now I know £5.66 isn't much, but isn't it illegal to say something was a higher price and that you're now discounting it, when you have actually been selling it at a lower price than the current "discounted" one?
Nope. The higher price has to be genuinely a previous price, and there's I think some guidance for how long/proportion of time that has to be. But check the laws in the jurisdiction the retailer reports in.Originally Posted by Nemz0r
I believe it has to be a higher price for at least a month.
Jon
Used to be but the rules seemed to have changed recently.
To me, as someone who isn't a lawyer, this is more about advertising guidelines than law, some examples here https://www.asa.org.uk/news/making-p...us-prices.html .
Your link points to an article dated in 2014. Things have moved on since.
https://marketinglaw.osborneclarke.c...the-spotlight/
That's interesting. OP's example might be covered in the guidance as discouraged in that case.
The Guide also provides three examples of price comparisons that may not be genuine:
1) Offering successive types of discounts on the same product. For example, month one: product priced at £500 but within a “Buy 2 get 10% off promotion”; month two “Was £500, now £350”.
2) The higher price is not the last price that the product was sold at, for example there have been intervening prices, but the higher price is used as the reference price.
3) There are a series of price claims but each subsequent claim does not offer a greater discount. For example, “Was £150, now £75”, followed by “Was £150, now £99”.
From the same link:
The Guide presents a step change to the PPG (and earlier guidance) because it suggests a framework within which businesses should consider pricing and promotions instead of the previous prescriptive approach. This means that well-known and practised rules, such as “28-days” for price establishment, are now gone. As the CTSI chief executive explained during the consultation process for the Guide: “…Only a court can decide if a business has broken the law and the guidance is not intended as a set of rules, instead illustrating whether a given practice is more or less likely to comply with the law. This method avoids creating the appearance of ‘safe harbours’ which the legislation underpinning the guidance does not provide.”
The guidance seems as clear as mud though.
Interesting! I'd opened this thread more out of curiousity than being angry at the retailer since I had the true price history available to me (though that's not the point, others don't), but with the information people have posted it seems they break the guidelines quite frequently, as do others. A certain company named after a large south american river comes to mind for having ridiculous claims on their "was" prices, but I guess they're too big to care?
This used to be frequent, with some retailers putting ex-VAT prices in their newsletters. I just checked my inbox and they seem to have stopped this, though they still put ex-VAT prices in the e-mail titles.For instance, where digital communications are concerned, it is confirmed that it may amount to an unfair practice if a trader’s technology requires the consumer to take extra steps (such as clicking on a link or scrolling down a page) to obtain material information, such as additional costs.
This certain company has a dynamic pricing policy. So it wouldn't surprise me if their own staff was confused by the rapid change in prices rather than something sinister.
On a personal note, I stopped shopping at this retailer since 2012 due to their ethics and noticing that other retailers offered cheaper prices. Never been worried about misleading prices as I like shopping around and developing a feel for the right prices.
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