What does a 25% off badge actually prove? As of November 10, 2026, Australia's competition regulator is treating that question as a compliance test rather than a marketing one, and it has extended its annual Black Friday sweep beyond retailer websites to promotional emails and social media posts for the first time Ragtrader. The shift matters for any brand running a discount calendar, because the evidence trail now has to exist before the claim is published rather than after a complaint arrives.
Four tactics, one test
Read the four categories together and a single test appears, which is whether the retailer can show at the moment of the claim what the price was and when. A sitewide claim needs an exclusion list, and a countdown needs an end date that is actually enforced. A low-stock message needs a stock figure behind it, and a reference price needs a history showing the product was sold at it recently.
The reference price is the soft spot
Most promotional systems are built to publish a discount rather than to prove one. The price file holds the current price and the compare-at price, and it rarely holds the date on which the compare-at price was last live. That is the gap regulators are now testing, because a reference price that was never charged turns a discount into a description of something that did not happen.
Enforcement history shows how narrow the margin for error has become. Vuly paid penalties over two separate instances involving a countdown timer that reset from an up to 30% off offer to an up to 45% off offer when the clock reached zero Mediaweek. James Lane paid penalties after a sale advertised to end on December 3 ran for another week, and in neither case did a customer have to be harmed in a provable way for the representation itself to be enough.
Fine print stopped working
The regulator's position is unusually direct, in that retailers should not rely on fine print disclaimers or exclusions to qualify the headline message of a promotion Ragtrader. In practice that removes the asterisk as a defence. If the headline says sitewide, the reasonable reading is every product, so a footnote that carves out half the catalogue does not repair the headline and instead confirms it was wrong.
Where marketing and finance drift apart
This is the point where promotional calendars built by marketing and price files maintained by finance start to disagree. The calendar says 25% off sitewide because that is the message that converts, and the price file says 25% off on 1,400 of 4,200 SKUs. Both teams are telling the truth about their own document, while the customer reads one claim that only one of them can support.
What a promotion looks like when the file is clean
| Claim | What enforcement has tested | What the price file needs |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 60% off sitewide | Whether exclusions were large enough to make the headline misleading | A list of qualifying SKUs and the share of catalogue they represent |
| Ends tonight | Whether the sale actually stopped at the stated time | A scheduled end time that cannot be extended without a new claim |
| Only 1 left | Whether stock was genuinely that low | A stock snapshot tied to the moment the message was sent |
| Was $399, now $249 | Whether $399 was ever the recent selling price | Dated price history with the last date the reference price was live |
None of this requires new technology, and all of it requires the price file to carry dates. It also requires the promotional calendar to be generated from the file rather than written alongside it. The retailers that fail tend to share one architecture, with a system that publishes, another that records, and no reconciliation between them until a regulator asks.
What a narrower claim costs
A narrower claim feels like a marketing loss and usually is not one. Saying 30% off on 1,400 lines, with the count stated, converts nearly as well as the sitewide version and survives an audit without a footnote. The version that converts best in the long run is the one that can be proven, because the second purchase depends on the first claim being true.
Three checks before the calendar goes live
The three checks are cheap because they only need documents that should already exist. Coverage lives in the promotion plan, history lives in the price file, and the end time lives in the content system. The reason they fail is not complexity, it is that nobody joins the three together before the campaign starts.
FAQ
Does this apply outside Australia?
The specific rules do not, but the test does. Any market with a consumer law covering misleading conduct will ask the same question: what was the price, and when.
Is a countdown timer itself a problem?
No. A timer that stops when it says it will is fine. The problem is a timer that is decorative rather than binding.
How far back does price history need to go?
Long enough to show the reference price was a real selling price, recently. A single day at full price weeks earlier is not a history.
What about marketplace listings we do not control?
Set a submission standard and audit a sample. The seller of record is still responsible for the claim on the listing.
