Rick Mather and Jenny Millar outline why boards must take charge of digital pricing practices before the Competition and Markets Authority does
Last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched formal investigations into eight businesses for suspected breaches of consumer protection law in their online pricing practices.
Armed with new direct enforcement powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA is examining drip pricing, pressure-selling tactics, fake scarcity claims and hidden mandatory fees. The sectors in the spotlight include event ticketing, fitness memberships, driving lessons and, significantly for FMCG readers, major online retailers of homeware, furniture and electrical appliances – among them Wayfair, Marks & Spencer Electrical and Appliances Direct.
This is not a routine probe. Fines can now reach 10 percent of global turnover, and the CMA has simultaneously written to more than 100 additional companies warning them to review their practices. For consumer-goods boards, the message is unambiguous: digital pricing has moved from an operational detail to a strategic, enterprise-wide risk that sits squarely in the boardroom.
What exactly is under scrutiny and what does this mean for the FMCG industry? The CMA is targeting four core practices:
- Drip pricing: revealing unavoidable fees only late in the purchasing journey
For example, adding a service fee on the checkout screen raises the price the shopper has been tracking and instantly weakens customer trust. - Reference pricing that exaggerates the size or legitimacy of a discount
Imagine products sold at their original price only briefly, or barely visible at that level, then presented as 40 percent off. Confidence erodes quickly when discounts feel engineered rather than earned. - Countdown timers and “limited stock” claims that create false urgency
Say a retailer uses a countdown that simply resets when you refresh. Shoppers soon realise nothing meaningful is expiring and begin to question every subsequent scarcity message. - Mandatory add-ons presented as optional choices
Consider being shown an eco delivery fee that appears optional at first yet is required to complete the order. Once the illusion of choice disappears, the overall price feels markedly less fair.
These are tactics being used across grocery, health and beauty, and household products to protect or enhance margin in a fiercely competitive e-commerce environment.
As online retailers look to cover rising fulfilment and operating costs, adding small fees can feel commercially sensible. A £2.99 basket fee on a £40 grocery order that falls below a minimum spend may seem like a minor adjustment that helps protect margin. Yet to the customer, these extras can feel like a bait-and-switch as the true price only becomes clear at the final moment of the purchase. The price they anchored to no longer matches what they are asked to pay, and trust is eroded in an instant.
Research consistently shows that unexpected costs are one of the single biggest reasons for cart abandonment. In a 2025 study by the Baymard Institute, 39 percent of shoppers named them as the primary reason for leaving a basket, with a further 14 percent citing an inability to calculate total cost upfront. One poorly judged surcharge or hidden fee can erase years of brand-building investment.
Trust, once damaged, is extraordinarily difficult to repair in consumer goods. FMCG brands live or die on habitual repurchase. When pricing feels manipulative, the emotional contract between brand and shopper fractures. A single viral TikTok complaint – “Paid £29.99 in basket, £38.47 at checkout” – can travel further and faster than any advertising campaign. In an age of budget-busting inflation and real-time sentiment tracking, the financial cost of lost loyalty almost always exceeds the short-term revenue gained from the hidden fee.
The CMA investigations expose a deeper governance failure that boards cannot afford to ignore. Pricing decisions have become highly fragmented across an organisation. Marketing owns promotions, e-Commerce owns the front-end experience, Finance owns margin targets, and legal signs off on terms buried deep in the footer. Often no-one owns the end-to-end customer pricing journey, and no executive has a clear mandate to balance commercial, reputational and regulatory objectives when it comes to pricing.
This vacuum is dangerous. The new consumer regime imposes direct personal accountability on senior managers if they knew (or ought reasonably to have known) about practices that breach the law. “We delegated it to the digital team” is no viable defence.
The solution is to create deliberate, board-sponsored governance around pricing. Leading organisations are responding in three practical ways:
- Appointing a senior Pricing Champion (often at Executive Committee level) with cross-functional authority over price setting and architecture, promotional mechanics and customer-facing presentation. This individual must be accountable for continuously questioning pricing effectiveness and ensuring that pricing remains a strategic focus within the business.
- Establishing a Pricing Council or steering group, chaired by a main-board director, that meets quarterly to review material pricing changes, audit compliance with consumer law, and stress-test tactics against reputational risk scenarios.
- Embedding systematic “trust checks” into the pricing process. For example, mandatory pre-launch reviews of the full customer journey from any device, explicit disclosure of unavoidable fees upfront, and regular sampling of real consumer sentiments.
Companies that make these changes often report tangible benefits from higher conversion rates, lower return rates, stronger Net Promoter Scores and – crucially – no unexpected visits from regulators.
The UK is moving first and fastest, but the direction of travel is global. The EU’s Digital Services Act and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s increasingly aggressive stance on “junk fees” mean that practices tolerated in 2023 are becoming liabilities in 2025 and beyond.
For FMCG boards, the imperative is clear. Pricing cannot be treated as a tactical lever operated in silos. It is a strategic capability that shapes customer trust, regulatory exposure and long-term profitability. The companies and leaders who recognise this seek guidance from experienced pricing experts, embed skilled pricing leaders at the heart of decision-making, and ensure active board oversight, will be the ones who stay off the front pages – for all the right reasons.
Our advice? Build trust through open and honest communication as well as transparent pricing. Consumers don’t like to be misled and, in the words of the infamous retailer Sam Walton: “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”. The CMA has sounded the alarm. The question for every consumer goods board is whether you are ready, willing and able to make the changes needed to ensure this doesn’t happen to you.
Rick Mather and Jenny Millar are leaders at Untapped Pricing, a pricing consultancy trusted by leadership teams and investors worldwide. Jenny is also co-author of The Pricing Sprint (Bloomsbury, May 2026).
