California is setting the pace and raising the stakes for online retailers facing deceptive pricing class actions, with recent cases and enforcement actions turning reference pricing from a clever marketing tool into a major legal risk.
As plaintiff firms and regulators sharpen their focus on fake discounts, strike through pricing, and algorithmic surveillance pricing, brands that sell into California (even without a store in the state) now need to treat pricing disclosures like high risk compliance territory,
not just marketing copy. 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Courts and regulators increasingly view these tactics as misleading when the reference price is outdated, artificially inflated, or unrelated to a genuine prevailing market price.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…
