Some countries (e.g. UK) have laws about this: you can't just make up a high price then advertise a big discount from that price. The higher price has to be "real" (usually defined as they were selling actual units of the thing to customers for that price for so many weeks, within so many weeks of the sale date).
The US definitely has rules on what constitutes a sale price. Though how often the FTC goes after retailers, I don't know. Probably only when someone complains.
I remember reading that France has hundreds of price inspectors who secretly visit stores all year taking down the prices.
When the annual discount season comes around, they compare the discount prices to the data compiled through the year to ensure the advertised discount percentages are real and representative of the long-term pricing trend (instead of, say, yanking up the price briefly before the discounts start).
Seems like we almost have this capability for online retailers thanks to sites like camelcamelcamel. Just needs the appropriate plug ins.
The canonical way to thwart this in meat space is to have channel-specific SKUs (e.g. same product sold at Best Buy and Costco but with different model numbers).
Channel specific SKUs is common already, but would it be legal to use the same trick for same-channel seasonal sales? I'm not aware of it being done, but maybe it is and I just haven't noticed.
For example, sell product all year round as item sku-0001 for $100, while also listing an identical product as item sku-0001b which costs $150 but is not promoted at all. Then the day before black friday, stop selling item sku-0001, and promote item sku-0001b for $105 with a flashing "30% off!!" sign?
If you're a third party trying this on Amazon then it has downsides such as lack of reviews, poor ranking etc. on sku-0001b that most of the year nobody is buying. But if you're a retailer with your own online shop, then you just say that the reviews are for this family of products and display the sku-0001 reviews on the sku-0001b page while promoting sku-0001b heavily during the black friday campaign...
And then the day after the sale ends, item sku-0001 magically reappears for its usual price of $100 ($5 cheaper than sku-0001b's sale price, but no flashing banner to promote the fact) and sku-0001b spends the next months to a year not being bought or promoted again.
> If you're a third party trying this on Amazon then it has downsides such as lack of reviews, poor ranking etc. on sku-0001b that most of the year nobody is buying
I doubt Amazon themselves would care. They permit a different scam in which you sell sku-0001a (say, a USB cable), garner lots of positive reviews, and then reassign the sku to a completely different device ($250 drone) and get lots of sales. FTC doesn’t appear to have paid any attention to Amazon’s scam enablement.
Going specifically to the topic of this post: I could imagine using this to reassign the sku from one laptop to another which would be much harder to enforce.
Some jurisdictions have laws about needing to have actual sales (within some time window) at the reference price, not merely being available at that price.
