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The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced a significant enforcement and compliance initiative under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 aimed at tackling misleading online pricing tactics.
Here is an 'at a glance' summary of the key points:
- Investigations opened into 8 businesses: StubHub, Viagogo, AA Driving School, BSM Driving School, Gold's Gym, Wayfair, Appliances Direct, and Marks Electrical.
- Advisory letters have been sent to 100 businesses
across 14 sectors highlighting concerns about practices
such as:
- Drip pricing (adding mandatory fees late in the purchase process).
- Misleading countdown timers and pressure selling tactics.
- New CMA guidance on Price Transparency has been published to help businesses comply with price transparency rules (see link at the bottom of this note). The CMA's message is that consumers must see accurate, upfront pricing and genuine sales offers to shop with confidence.
- Context: The crackdown follows a cross-economy review of 400+ businesses since April 2025, when the CMA gained its new powers and the new DMCC Act came into effect.
- The start of things to come: These are the first enforcement cases under the CMA's new powers, which allow it to choose which businesses to investigate, conduct the investigation (using strong powers to compel disclosure of confidential information), and decide if the business has breached consumer law — all without going to court. It can then impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover and order compensation for affected consumers, as well as elicit undertakings to ensure businesses change their practices.
New Price Transparency Guidance
The new Price Transparency guidance, which businesses across all sectors are expected to follow, can be found here.
Consent For Additional Charges
They also issued guidance on the topic of getting consent for additional charges, which can be accessed here.
It makes clear that if you are offering optional extras linked to the main product you are selling, you should not charge for those extras by default.
Consumers must have genuine choice over whether to pay for an extra product or service they may or may not wish to choose. You can't use pre-ticked boxes or other forms of automatic opt-in for optional extras, if that means the customer will have to pay for them unless they take action to opt out.
Optional extras can include things like insurance, express delivery and making donations to charity.
You need to get your customer's express consent for any additional payment – they must actively choose to make the payment (so avoid pre-ticked boxes).
You must:
- clearly explain any additional payments that consumers can choose to make
- make sure that customers expressly consent to additional payments before they are charged
- give customers a way to check and confirm what they are paying for.
Next steps
If your business received a letter from the CMA - you're on notice that you need to review your pricing practices, and take action to bring your practices into alignment with that, to avoid a CMA investigation and enforcement action. Don't hang around!
If you didn't receive a letter from them... congratulations! But you still need to urgently review your pricing practices, to ensure they align with the new guidance to avoid future enforcement action.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
