OPINION: I have fallen victim to a dodgy offer – can firms be stopped from doing this?
Originally published in The i Paper 23 June 2025. Permission to publish all opinion pieces authored by Rocio Concha, sought and granted on 3 July 2025.
Dear Rocio,
I have just been caught out by some very sharp advertising with a dubious price offer. I am poorer but wiser. What is being done about firms offering dodgy price tactics?
Name and address supplied
Rocio Says: There have always been examples of retailers who push the boundaries with tricksy pricing tactics. We all encounter this in some form, whether it’s a ‘closing down’ sale for a store that mysteriously never shuts its doors, or the use of false scarcity (‘only two left’!) to pressure quick purchases.
These days, the internet has provided bad actors in the retail space with a new avenue to mislead consumers with dubious tactics. New research from Which? has uncovered dodgy pricing practices used by online retailers that make our shopping experience frustrating.
Which?’s latest research exposes problems with the use of ‘was/now’ pricing. This is where retailers show a previous price for a product to give the impression that shoppers are making a saving if they opt to buy it now.
When we checked the pricing history of over 1,600 TVs with ‘was/now’ pricing at four major tech retailers across the past year, over half (56%) had at least one price between the sale price and the advertised ‘was’ price. And four in 10 (40%) had a “was” price that lasted for less time than the sale price. Some retailers combined both these tactics together to create the illusion of significant savings, when in reality the higher price may only have been charged for a short time many months ago.
Change the channel to sports and it’s a similar story. One popular retailer that frustrated many shoppers was Sports Direct. Following up on their complaints, we looked at the pricing of 160 popular products on SportsDirect.com where ‘Recommended Retail Price’ (RRP) as well as less familiar but equivalent ‘Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price’ or ‘Suggested Retail Price’ were used as a comparison against the retailer’s selling price. We found 58 examples of products where we couldn’t find any other retailer selling them online at or above the Sports Direct reference price - again suggesting the saving may not be genuine.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says shoppers would understand RRPs to be the price the item is generally sold at. This means some shoppers may think some of these prices at Sports Direct are better than they might find elsewhere.
Sports Direct is just one of several retailers under the Frasers Group umbrella. There are other retailers, such as USC, Studio and Get The Label in the same group that sometimes sell the same products. Frasers Group also owns a large portfolio of brands sold by Sports Direct, such as Jack Wills, Slazenger, and Everlast. In some cases, Frasers Group retailers appeared to be the only sellers of these own-brand products. Consider, for example, a pair of Slazenger men’s Drive tennis shoes. While Sports Direct listed them at £32.99 (a significant discount from the £64.99 MSRP), our checks revealed they were available on eight other websites. Crucially, all these sellers were part of the wider Frasers Group. Seven of these retailers sold the shoes for £32.99 (or £33 in one case), with only the official Slazenger brand website listing them at the full MSRP. This is relevant because the ASA says: ‘If a marketer is the only seller of a product, and so has set the price themselves, it’s unlikely to be acceptable to refer to the price as an RRP.’ Whether that applies where the only sellers are members of the same group is unclear.
Which? has shared these findings with the Competition and Markets Authority, the watchdog in charge of ensuring markets work fairly. We believe some of Sports Direct’s uses of reference prices could be ‘misleading actions’ under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, as they could mislead people about the value of a product and the savings they could make. The competition regulator should not hesitate to take action to address opaque pricing tactics that distort consumer choice and impede genuine competition.