California’s Strict Rules are Turning Fake Discounts into Real Class Action Lawsuits

Why Deceptive Pricing Suits are Rising According to Eversheds Sutherland’s recent analysis on JD Supra, online retailers are facing a significant and growing wave of class actions challenging the way they present prices, discounts, and original list prices on their sites.

These suits typically attack reference pricing or comparison pricing, for example, an item shown as $49 with a struck through was $99 label, where the higher price was never (or almost never) actually charged in the real market.

Courts and regulators increasingly view these tactics as misleading when the reference price is outdated, artificially inflated, or unrelated to a genuine prevailing market price.

Over roughly the last ten years, close to 300 class actions have been filed against retailers over pricing representations, underscoring that this is no longer a niche theory but a mainstream plaintiffs playbook…