We read the public product data of 877 Australian Shopify stores and checked every comparison price against the price actually being charged. 276 stores had at least one that does not add up. The worst had 1395.
Scanned August 2026. No store is named. Method at the bottom.
Stores displaying at least one product where the crossed-out 'was' price sits below the price being charged. Median among affected stores was 3 products. This is almost never deliberate. It is what a sale looks like six months after it ended.
| Category | Stores | Affected | Worst store |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coffee roasters | 152 | 28% | 29 |
| Fashion | 88 | 26% | 112 |
A larger share of roasters are affected, while the single worst case is a fashion store. We can count that; we cannot tell you why from a scan, so we are not going to guess at a reason.
The ACCC lists "promoting a price as being a sale or special price, when it is actually the normal price" among its published examples of misleading price displays, and states plainly that businesses must not display prices that are wrong or likely to create a false impression.
It also makes a point that catches more stores than the obvious one: where an item sits at a sale price for an extended period, it may be misleading to keep calling it a sale, because the price has effectively become the normal selling price. A permanent discount is not a discount.
In June 2026 a Melbourne online retailer paid $79,200 after the ACCC issued four infringement notices, two of them over strikethrough pricing and two over statements in its returns policy. The ACCC notes that paying an infringement notice is not an admission of a contravention.
None of that is a legal opinion about any particular store, and this page is not legal advice. It is a count.
Plenty of stores set a comparison price exactly equal to the selling price. It looks untidy in the data, and most scanners would happily count it against you to make the number bigger. We did not, because most Shopify themes render nothing at all for it, so no shopper ever sees a discount that is not there. It is a housekeeping issue, not a pricing one.
Check your own store's pricing Paste your address, get your numbers in about five seconds. No app install, no login to your store.Every Shopify store serves its full catalogue at /products.json,
publicly, with no key and no login. Each variant carries both price and
compare_at_price. We read those at one request per second with an
identifying user agent, and compared them. Nothing behind a login, no orders, no
customer data.
Here is the honest limit. A single scan sees today's prices and nothing else. It can tell you a 'was' price is lower than what you are charging, because that is arithmetic. It cannot tell you whether a product genuinely sold at its 'was' price beforehand, or how long it has been sitting on the same discount — and that is exactly what the ACCC guidance turns on. Answering it needs price history, which no store's admin keeps and no one-off scan can reconstruct. Anyone claiming otherwise from a single crawl is guessing.
Catalogues were capped at 2,000 products, so a few counts are floors rather than totals, and roughly one store in ten disables the public feed and is missing from the sample entirely.