€90,000 fine for two e-commerce companies for falsifying sales during last Black Friday

Summer sales are already in full swing. Ministry of Social Rights, Consumption and the 2030 Agenda made the move as a veiled warning. “Be careful of false discounts,” he said, issuing a statement explaining that has just fined two e-commerce operators €90,000 for “making misleading sales over the past Black Friday“ and it has open source files of this style for six other major operators trade.

“Deceptive discounts refer to the fact that These operators raised prices on various items before Black Friday and then lowered them back to the original price.“, a practice which the Ministry of Consumer Affairs believes constitutes a breach of Section 20 of the Retail Trade Regulation Act,” the organisation said in a statement. These types of movements, they later clarified, are “unfair practices that can be classified as serious violations

and carries fines of up to €100,000, an amount that can be exceeded to four to six times the illegal benefit obtained.”

The text does not provide the names of the companies fined, nor of those that could face sanctions of more than half a million euros for violations of this kind, but one of the audits carried out by the Generalitat of Catalonia in recent years provides some clues. company profile. After the 2022 campaign, Consum found price changes in half of the products analyzed and directly blamed them for this. PC Components, Carrefour, Euronics, FNAC, I look like, English court, Media Markt, Conforama And In field.

In any case, regardless of the specific names, Consumption comes to the conclusion that this practice is more than widespread. After monitoring 1,000 products, the department found that 60% of the companies studied were engaging in this practice.As an example, they cite sneakers that were sold for around 30 euros from November 18 to 19, were advertised for almost 50 euros on November 20, and then dropped again to 29.99 euros on November 24.

“Consumers are being misled into believing that they can purchase the product at a discount of €18.96, which is not true because the price has been raised in the previous days,” concludes Consumo, which warns that it is now implementing price controls to try to prevent this kind of scam during the summer sales.“The goal is to continue monitoring the discounts offered by major operators through their online sales in order to identify new ‘false discounts’ that may be implemented and to sanction them, if necessary, to ensure consumer rights,” they go deeper.

As they remember from Ministry under the leadership Pablo Bustinduy, The law governing discounts states that The offer must always be accompanied by a previous price, and this price must be the lowest in the last thirty days.