The “Was Price” on Your WooCommerce Sale Might Be Illegal

[LAST UPDATED: March 2026]

Open any WooCommerce product edit screen and you’ll find two fields side by side: “Regular price” and “Sale price.” Enter a number in both, and WooCommerce does something that feels like pure marketing upside — it crosses out the regular price and shows the sale price next to it. The crossed-out figure signals a bargain. Customers see what they’re saving. Conversions tend to improve.

What the interface doesn’t tell you — not in the field labels, not in the documentation, not anywhere in the setup process — is that the number you type into the “Regular price” box is a legal claim. You are representing to every customer who visits that page that the product was genuinely offered at that price, for a real period of time, as your honest asking price. If that representation is false, you may be in violation of federal consumer protection guidance and, depending on where your customers are located, state law that carries civil penalties and class action exposure.

This isn’t a theoretical risk that applies only to major retailers. The enforcement landscape has shifted significantly in recent years toward online sellers of all sizes, and the plaintiffs’ bar has identified WooCommerce-style strikethrough pricing as one of the most fertile areas for class action litigation. Knowing how the rules work — and how easy it is to inadvertently break them — is now a basic operational requirement for any WooCommerce store that runs sales.

How WooCommerce displays sale prices — and what it doesn’t warn you about

The mechanics are straightforward. When you enter a value in the “Sale price” field on a WooCommerce product, the platform automatically:

• Displays the sale price as the active price on the product page
• Shows the regular price with a strikethrough line through it
• Applies a “Sale!” badge to the product in shop listings
• Calculates and optionally displays a percentage saving

You can also schedule this to run between specific dates using the “Schedule” option — the sale price activates and deactivates automatically. Most stores use this for promotions: Black Friday, seasonal clearances, product launches.

All of this is purely mechanical. WooCommerce has no opinion about whether your regular price is genuine, how long you’ve been charging it, or whether it reflects a real market price. It treats the regular price field as a number you type in. The visual implication — that this was the real, former price of the product — is entirely on you to substantiate.

This is the gap that matters. The display creates a legal representation that the platform has no mechanism to verify. Every guide, tutorial, and help article about WooCommerce sale pricing focuses entirely on how to set it up. None of them explain what the law requires the regular price to actually be.

What the FTC’s pricing rules actually require

The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233) have been in effect since 1964. They are not technically binding regulations — they’re “guides,” meaning they describe what the FTC considers deceptive rather than imposing hard statutory penalties. But violating them creates liability under the FTC Act’s prohibition on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” and they set the interpretive framework that state consumer protection laws follow.

The core requirement for former price comparisons — the “was $X, now $Y” type of display — is stated clearly in 16 CFR § 233.1:

“If the former price is the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time, it provides a legitimate basis for the advertising of a price comparison.”

— FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, 16 CFR § 233.1

Three elements are doing the work here, and each one has teeth:

1. “Actual, bona fide price”

The former price must be the real price at which you offered the product — not a number you invented to make the discount look larger, not a manufacturer’s suggested retail price you’ve never actually charged, not a price you set briefly just to establish a reference point. The FTC is explicit about what happens when you use a fictitious former price: “the ‘bargain’ being advertised is a false one; the purchaser is not receiving the unusual value he expects.”

This rules out a common pattern in e-commerce: setting a high regular price that nobody ever pays, purely to make the sale price look like a significant discount. If your “regular price” of $150 exists only so that your “sale price” of $89 appears to represent 40% off — when $89 is effectively your normal selling price — the regular price is not bona fide.

2. “Offered to the public on a regular basis”

The price must have been genuinely available to normal customers, not just listed. It can’t be a theoretical maximum, a price reserved for a channel nobody uses, or a price that existed briefly as a prelude to a “sale.” The FTC notes that a former price is not automatically fictitious just because no sales were actually made at it — but the advertiser “should be especially careful” in that situation, ensuring the price was “openly and actively offered for sale, for a reasonably substantial period of time, in the recent, regular course of his business, honestly and in good faith.”

3. “For a reasonably substantial period of time”

The guides don’t define “reasonably substantial” with a number of days, which is intentional — it’s a facts-and-circumstances standard. But the intent is clear: a price you raised for two weeks specifically to create headroom for a “sale” doesn’t qualify. The FTC gives a pointed example in the guidance: a retailer who raises pen prices from $7.50 to $10.00 for a short period before marking them down and advertising them as “reduced from $10.00” is engaging in deceptive pricing. The temporary elevation of the price doesn’t make it a genuine former price.

State laws that go further than the FTC

The FTC guides set the federal floor. Several states have enacted their own pricing statutes that are more specific — and more enforceable through private rights of action, meaning individual consumers or class action plaintiffs can sue without waiting for a regulator to act.

California — the most litigated jurisdiction

California Business and Professions Code § 17501 is the statute that has generated the most reference pricing litigation in the US by a significant margin. Under § 17501, the former price used in any price comparison must be the product’s “prevailing market price” — the price at which the product was generally sold in the relevant market. And that prevailing market price must have been in effect within the three months preceding the advertisement.

If the product has not been sold at the claimed former price within the prior 90 days, California law requires the seller to disclose the date when the former price was last in effect. The failure to do this — or the use of an inflated former price that was never a genuine prevailing market price — is actionable under California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law.

The key practical point: if any of your customers are in California, California law applies to your pricing display. You do not need a physical presence in the state. Online stores have been successfully sued under § 17501 by California residents purchasing from out-of-state websites, because the advertisement was seen and acted upon in California.

Oregon — the 30-day rule

Oregon’s statute requires that any product advertised at a promotional price must have been offered at the regular (non-promotional) price within the preceding 30 days. This is a stricter temporal standard than California’s 90-day window, and it creates a practical requirement: if you haven’t actually charged your regular price in the last 30 days, you may not legally claim it as a “was” price in Oregon.

New Jersey — the 28-days-in-90 standard

New Jersey takes a different approach. Under New Jersey law, a former price used in a price comparison must be provably the price at which the product was offered for at least 28 out of the immediately preceding 90 days, calculated on a rolling basis. This is not just “was it offered at this price at some point in the last 90 days” — it’s a frequency requirement. The price must have been the regular price for most of that window.

Connecticut — 90 days or disclose

Connecticut allows comparison pricing based on a former price from the last 90 days. If the former price is older than that, the seller must explicitly disclose the timeframe in which the former price was in effect. The comparison itself isn’t prohibited, but the disclosure is mandatory.

Missouri — the 10% sales floor

Missouri adds a sales-volume dimension: there is a presumption of non-compliance if the seller cannot demonstrate that at least 10% of total sales of the product were made at the comparison price within the 12 months preceding the advertisement. This is a meaningful bar — if your product has been on perpetual sale for most of the year, the regular price may not qualify as a legitimate comparison price under Missouri law regardless of how long ago it was charged.

The EU and UK: different rules entirely

If you sell into European markets — or have UK customers — the framework is completely different from the US approach, and in some ways more prescriptive.

The EU Omnibus Directive — the 30-day lowest price rule

The EU Omnibus Directive, which came into force in May 2022, changed how price reductions must be displayed across all EU member states. The requirement is specific and algorithmically verifiable: when a seller advertises a price reduction, the reference price shown must be the seller’s lowest price for that product during the 30-day period immediately before the promotion began.

This is fundamentally different from the US standard. In the US, the question is whether the former price was genuine — was it really offered, for a real period, in good faith? In the EU, the question is mathematical: what was the actual lowest price in the last 30 days? The rule doesn’t care whether that was a regular price or a promotional price. If you ran a flash sale last week and it brought the price to €45, that €45 becomes the reference price for any subsequent promotion, not the €75 regular price you charged before and after the flash sale.

This has significant implications for stores that run frequent promotions. A sequence of overlapping or closely-spaced sales can ratchet the reference price downward with each cycle, making it harder to legitimately show a meaningful discount. The EU rule was specifically designed to prevent the “fake sale” pattern — the perpetual promotional display where a product is never actually sold at its nominal regular price.

There are narrow exceptions: perishable goods (food, beverages) are exempt. Products on the market for fewer than 30 days have a modified standard. And for progressive, continuously-deepening promotions within the same campaign, the rule applies at the start of the promotion rather than throughout.

The UK — ASA enforcement and the DMCCA 2024

The UK’s framework for reference pricing operates through two channels. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) handles advertising complaints using the CAP Code, which requires that any reference price used as a comparison be the most recent price at which the product was genuinely offered — and that the period at that price be long enough to make the comparison meaningful rather than manufactured.

The ASA has been consistent in its enforcement on this. In a 2024 ruling, it found that a brand advertising a product as “HALF PRICE” against an RRP had violated the CAP Code because the product had only ever sold at the “half price” — the RRP had never been a genuine selling price. The reference price was fictitious, and the “savings” claim was misleading regardless of how the price was labelled.

At the legislative level, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) updated the UK’s consumer protection framework with new enforcement powers. The Competition and Markets Authority can now issue fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover for breaches of consumer protection law — powers it has signalled it will use actively, including in the area of online pricing practices.

The three ways WooCommerce stores most commonly violate these rules

The legal requirements are relatively clear. The challenge is that WooCommerce’s interface makes it easy — almost frictionless — to inadvertently violate them. There are three patterns that come up repeatedly.

1. The inflated regular price

The most common pattern: a store sets the regular price at a level higher than what it realistically expects to charge, specifically to make the sale price appear to represent a significant discount. The product was never intended to sell at $150 — the actual price it moves at is $89 — but the “Regular price” field in WooCommerce shows $150 with a strikethrough.

Sometimes this happens consciously, because the owner has seen that the display improves conversions and doesn’t realise the legal dimension. Sometimes it happens because the store imported products with inflated MSRP data and never corrected it. Sometimes it happened years ago during setup and nobody has questioned it since.

Whatever the origin, the effect is the same: every product page showing that display is an ongoing representation to customers that the product was previously offered at the higher price, when it wasn’t. Under 16 CFR § 233.1, this is the textbook definition of a fictitious former price.

2. The permanent sale

WooCommerce sale prices can be set without a schedule — the product remains “on sale” indefinitely until someone manually removes the sale price. Many stores use this to run what becomes, effectively, a permanent sale: the sale price is the normal selling price, and the crossed-out regular price is simply always there.

This creates a specific problem. Under most state laws, the “former price” must have been the price at which the product was actually offered within a recent window — 30 to 90 days, depending on jurisdiction. If a product has been on perpetual sale for six months, there’s no recent period during which the crossed-out price was actually the active price. The reference price is technically real — it exists in the database — but it’s not meeting the recency requirement that makes it legally usable.

Under Missouri’s standard, a product on perpetual sale that has never generated 10% of its sales at the regular price fails the sales-floor test entirely. Under Oregon’s 30-day rule, if the product hasn’t charged the regular price in over a month, the display is already non-compliant.

The “permanent sale” pattern also creates a behavioural signal that courts have paid attention to. Kohl’s faced a class action specifically alleging an “always-on-sale” scheme — that their advertised sale prices were functionally the regular prices, and the crossed-out higher prices existed solely to create the appearance of savings. The case resulted in a $6.15 million settlement.

3. The MSRP or competitor price used as “regular price”

Some stores populate the “Regular price” field with the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, a competitor’s price, or the highest price they found anywhere for the product — rather than their own actual former selling price. This is distinct from the inflated price scenario: here, the number might be accurate as a market data point, but it’s presented as the seller’s own former price, which it wasn’t.

The FTC guides are clear that comparisons with a seller’s own former price carry a specific legal standard. Comparisons with a competitor’s price or a manufacturer’s price are permitted, but they require explicit disclosure of what the reference price represents. Presenting a competitor’s price or MSRP in the same visual format as your own former price — crossed out, next to your current price — implies it’s your former price. If it isn’t, the display is misleading.

Overstock.com ran into exactly this problem. Their internal policy allowed employees to set reference prices by finding the highest price for a product anywhere in the marketplace, or by applying a multiplier to their own wholesale cost. When California regulators investigated, internal emails showed Overstock employees describing the resulting reference prices as “egregiously overstated.” The California Court of Appeal upheld a $6.8 million judgment against them in 2017 — the largest civil penalty ever obtained in a US price advertising enforcement case at that time.

Real enforcement: what happens when stores get it wrong

It’s worth being specific about the enforcement landscape, because the scale of the consequences varies significantly based on who you are and where your customers are.

The cases that established the standard

Overstock.com (California, 2017): $6.8 million civil penalty. The core issue was Overstock’s practice of using marketplace-highest or formula-derived reference prices rather than actual former prices. The court imposed a five-year injunction requiring all reference prices to reflect actual market selling prices, with documentation requirements and a 90-day maximum age for any reference price.

J.C. Penney (2015): $50 million settlement. The allegations centred on a systematic “fake sale” scheme in which JCPenney marked prices up before running “sales” that returned them to normal levels, creating the false impression of significant discounts. The settlement also included injunctive relief requiring meaningful changes to pricing practices.

Kohl’s (2024): $6.15 million settlement. The class action alleged that Kohl’s “always-on-sale” model — where products routinely sold at the advertised sale price rather than the crossed-out higher price — made the reference pricing display systematically deceptive. The settlement covered consumers who made purchases during the relevant period and saw the pricing display.

Michael Kors (2016): $4.875 million settlement fund, plus $975,000 in attorney fees. The allegations involved inflated “original” prices in outlet and online channels that did not reflect genuine regular prices.

The trend toward smaller defendants

For the first decade of reference pricing litigation, enforcement focused almost entirely on major national retailers. Since around 2020, the pattern has shifted. Plaintiffs’ firms have developed efficient playbooks for identifying reference pricing violations — automated tools that monitor price changes, check whether listed regular prices appear to match actual transaction prices, and flag perpetual-sale patterns — and have begun applying them to mid-sized and smaller online retailers.

A January 2025 class action filed against Patagonia alleges that the company advertised inflated reference prices and ran perpetual discounts that did not reflect genuine prevailing prices. If Patagonia’s scale hasn’t insulated it from this type of suit, smaller brands operating with less sophisticated pricing controls certainly have no immunity.

The mechanism for finding plaintiffs is increasingly automated. A California consumer who purchased from your store, saw a crossed-out price that turned out not to be genuine, and is represented by a firm with a class action pricing practice can potentially name your store in a complaint. The cost of defending — regardless of outcome — is real.

What compliant reference pricing actually looks like

Understanding the rules is useful. Knowing what to actually do with them is what matters.

Audit your current regular prices

The first step is understanding what your WooCommerce store is currently showing. Go through your products — particularly any that are marked as “on sale” — and ask honestly:

• Is this regular price the price at which this product has been genuinely sold or offered in the last 30-90 days?
• Has this product been on perpetual sale since the regular price was set, meaning the regular price has never been charged in any recent window?
• Did this regular price come from an MSRP field, a competitor price lookup, or a formula — rather than an actual selling price on your store?
• Was this regular price ever charged for a meaningful period, or was it set briefly as a reference point before a promotional period began?

If the honest answer to any of these questions suggests the regular price isn’t bona fide, that product’s pricing display is a compliance risk. The remediation is straightforward — either set the regular price to what the product actually sold for and charge it for a genuine period, or remove the sale display entirely and just charge a single price.

Make sales time-bounded

One of the cleaner structural changes you can make is to ensure that sales have real start and end dates, and that the regular price is genuinely active between them. A product that sells at its regular price for most of the year, goes on sale for Black Friday, returns to its regular price in December, and goes on sale again for a January clearance has a defensible pricing history. The regular price is real. The sale is time-bounded. The reference price is accurate.

A product that entered the store at $89 “sale price” with a $150 “regular price” two years ago and has never changed has neither of these things.

WooCommerce’s date scheduling fields on the sale price — the “Schedule” link next to the sale price field — exist for exactly this purpose. Using them isn’t just operationally useful; it creates an audit trail showing that the sale had a defined period. Campaign-based discount systems that apply time-bounded promotions on top of genuine regular prices go further, creating a campaign history that documents when each product was on sale versus when it was charging its full price.

If you use MSRP or competitor prices, label them correctly

If your pricing display compares your price against a manufacturer’s suggested retail price or a competitor’s price, make that explicit. “Our price: $89 | MSRP: $150” is a different representation from “Was: $150 | Now: $89.” The first makes clear the reference is external. The second implies the $150 was your own former price. The FTC guides permit competitor price comparisons and MSRP comparisons — but they require disclosure of what the reference price actually is.

Many WooCommerce themes and plugins allow you to add a label to the regular price display. Using this to note “MSRP” or “RRP” where applicable is a simple and effective way to make the comparison transparent. It’s also better marketing: a customer who understands they’re paying below the market rate has a clearer reason to buy than a customer who sees a crossed-out price with no context.

For EU customers, track the 30-day lowest price

If you have meaningful EU sales volume, compliance with the Omnibus Directive requires tracking the lowest price you’ve charged for each product over the prior 30 days and displaying that — not your regular price — as the reference price in any promotion. WooCommerce doesn’t do this natively. You either need a plugin that implements this tracking and display logic, or a manual process that captures the information and updates the display before each promotion begins.

The practical implication: if you ran any promotion in the last 30 days, the reference price for your current promotion must reflect that lower price, not the regular price before the earlier promotion. This is why some retailers with complex promotional calendars have found it difficult to show meaningful “savings” under the Omnibus standard — a sequence of sales can compress the reference price to the point where the next sale can only legitimately show a small reduction.

The documentation habit that protects you

Across all jurisdictions, the key word in the compliance standards is “documented.” California requires that you be able to demonstrate the prevailing market price. Overstock was required by the court to maintain documentation of reference prices for two years. The FTC’s standard requires prices to have been genuinely offered “in the recent, regular course of business.”

All of this requires records. Not elaborate records — but systematic ones. The minimum useful documentation for a WooCommerce store is:

• A log of when each product’s price changed, including the date and what it changed to
• A record of when sale prices were active, with start and end dates
• Screenshots or exports showing what prices were displayed to customers at relevant periods

WooCommerce doesn’t maintain this natively in a form you can easily access. Some hosting environments include database change logs. WooCommerce’s order history shows what customers actually paid, which provides indirect evidence of what prices were active. But systematic price-history tracking is something most stores have to build as a deliberate practice.

The value of this documentation isn’t just legal protection — though it is that. It’s also useful operationally. If your pricing is genuinely well-managed — regular prices that are real, sales that are time-bounded, a clear record of what was charged when — you’ll know it. And if you’re ever asked to demonstrate that your reference pricing was legitimate, you’ll have the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

The legal obligation hiding in plain sight

The most striking thing about the reference pricing problem in WooCommerce is how invisible it is. Every tutorial explains how to set a regular price and a sale price. None of them mention what the regular price legally has to represent. WooCommerce’s interface has been facilitating millions of potentially non-compliant pricing displays — not because it’s designed poorly, but because it has no opinion about the legal meaning of the number you type into a field.

The law does have an opinion. The FTC has had one since 1964. California has had one since its Business and Professions Code was enacted. The EU codified its standard in 2022. And enforcement — particularly through private class actions in California and through increasing regulator activity on both sides of the Atlantic — is actively expanding toward online sellers who’ve been operating on the assumption that these rules only apply to department stores.

The compliance path isn’t complicated. Use regular prices that reflect what you actually charge. Run sales with defined start and end dates, not permanent sale displays. If you reference an MSRP or a competitor’s price, say so clearly. Keep records showing when each price was in effect. None of this requires expensive tools or legal counsel for most stores — it requires treating the regular price field in WooCommerce as the legal representation it actually is, rather than a marketing input field with no consequences.

The strikethrough price on your product page is a promise to every customer who sees it: this is what the product was genuinely worth before it went on sale. If that promise is accurate, you’re protected and customers are well-served. If it isn’t, you’re carrying a legal risk that most of your competitors haven’t thought about either — which is both the problem and, if you act now, a quiet advantage.