Websites artificially inflating their prices then saying they have a sale on

jimmyeatworld

A friend told me about a product he bought on bulkpowders.co.uk I:

In the search results, it said it was £3.49

As I'm new I couldn't post a link to go to google and search for 'bulk powders fish jerky' see the price in the search result description then:

Go to the webpage - suddenly its £4.49 but that's alright because they now have a 30% sale on. When you spend £10 or more. Isn't this illegal?

Of course, 30% of £4.49 is £1.35 (if you round up) take that from £4.49 which gives you £3.14. Yes, it's cheaper than the cached price £3.49 (which it used to be) in the search results but now you have to buy £10 worth of product to get that.

I love the caching ability of these search engines because they catch out these shifty Marketeers trying to pull the wool over our eyes!!

Is there a way to attach images to a post?

I feel like complaining about this - who can I go to, to raise this... Is this illegal?

SuperPikachu

Isn't this what the Supermarkets were all doing? I think they have to have a price set for a certain length of time before they are allowed to then say it is on sale.

I'm unsure if this rule carries for online retailers or even if it matters to foreign companies though.

mije1983

So you are saying it was £3.49 but now it's gone up to £4.49?

Maybe it was in a sale and now that offer has finished? The previous offer was £1 off, the current offer is save 30% when you spend £10. Sales change all the time. The 30% offer seems to be on a lot of things across the site so you'd need to see if ALL of those items had an increase in price.

Looking back at previous saved pages of that item, it seems they have regularly been £4.49 so it seems that's more of the 'standard' price rather than an inflated one

I don't see, at the moment, they have done anything illegal.