Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, the CMA can now decide for itself that consumer law has been broken and impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover. The October cases show what it is looking for, and both of them come down to how an online shop is built and run day to day.
- Wayfair: products sold as 24-hour Flash Deals, with countdown timers, stayed at the same or a lower price after the deadline passed
- Appliances Direct: countdown banners promoted discounts that kept reappearing with the same codes over several days
- Appliances Direct: paid extras such as installation and recycling were pre-selected at checkout, and around £432,000 must be refunded
All three businesses in the announcement, including a London gym franchise fined for leaving joining fees out of its prices, admitted the breaches and settled early, which reduced their fines by 40%.
A countdown timer is a promise about price. If the price is the same tomorrow, the timer was not telling the truth.
Where this lives in your platform
These are rarely decisions anyone takes deliberately. They come from a timer component that resets for every visitor, a promotion that is set to recur, a discount code that never expires, or a checkout option someone set to on by default years ago. That makes them fixable, but only if someone goes and looks.
- Do your promotions end when they say they will, with the price changing back and the banner removed automatically?
- Are countdown timers tied to a real end date, rather than resetting per session or per visitor?
- Can a discount code or deal be reused indefinitely, so a limited offer is in practice permanent?
- Are any paid extras, warranties or services selected by default at checkout?
- Is the full price, including any mandatory fee, shown wherever a price appears?
- Can you show, from your own records, what an item cost before and after each promotion?
With Black Friday a month away, this is the week to review the promotions already scheduled. Changing how a timer or a checkout option behaves is a small piece of development work. Explaining it to the CMA afterwards is not.
