Black Friday and Cyber Monday, EU investigation unveils irregular discounts and deceptive practices
Out of 314 online sellers, 30% applied promotions that did not comply with the rules. It is now up to the national consumer protection authorities to take action with sanctions
Key points
Offers so generous that they look suspicious? This is not the impression of an overly judicious user but a factual reality. Evidence that emerged from a recent investigation conducted by the European Commission and the consumer protection authority of 23 Member States, Iceland and Norway, which turned the spotlight on a very unclear picture: out of 314 operators and online marketplaces monitored, in 2025 about 30 per cent applied irregular or erroneously inflated discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Survey Results and Objective
The aim of the sweep (the annual coordinated monitoring activity of the EU and national governments to flush out cases of violation of consumer protection rules) was, in this case, to verify adherence to the European Directive on price indications. In particular, the alignment to the "30 days" provision: when a discount is announced, the company is obliged to indicate, as an element of comparison, the lowest price applied in the 30 days preceding the start of the sales. Not only that: the discounted figure (and then proposed to potential customers) must already include all 'compulsory and unavoidable' costs, including shipping costs and VAT.
Looking in detail at the numbers of the blanket screening, next to the 30 per cent of sellers who did not comply with the '30 days' rule, there is a 30 per cent who did so only partially, and a risky 40 per cent who followed to the letter what Brussels had stipulated, without attracting buyers with incorrect and misleading percentages.
Focus on deceptive practices
But it doesn't end there: the survey also turned the spotlight on a series of deceptive practices, increasingly adopted by e-commerce platforms to influence consumer choices. And undermine competition, above all traditional commerce. It turned out that 36 per cent of online sellers attempted to add optional items to consumer baskets: of these, four out of ten did so without asking for or obtaining explicit consent. Thirty-four per cent also used the technique of "comparing the prices of similar brands" but six out of ten did not clearly explain which benchmark was used for comparison.
Again, 18 per cent used 'pressure selling' techniques, such as communicating that an item was almost sold out when in fact it was not or using a countdown timer to speed up the purchase. The sweep revealed that more than half of the cases analysed started with opaque intentions or outright false claims (such as that of imminent stock out in order to convince customers to rush to buy the item). A smaller but still relevant percentage, 10 per cent, finally resorted to so-called'drip pricing', adding extra or late costs to the product price, such as shipping or service charges.
