Spain has fined a number of retailers for offering misleading Black Friday deals.
The Ministry of Social Rights and Consumer Affairs has imposed sanctions on Mediamarkt, Carrefour, PC Componentes, Notino Italia and Gestaweb 2020.
The ministry concluded that they offered misleading discounts during the 2023 season.
The sanctions form part of a wider investigation that resulted in €350,000 in penalties for seven large companies.
It comes after minister Pablo Bustinduy recently announced a new monitoring campaign targeting suspicious price practices during this year’s Black Friday and the upcoming Cyber Monday.
The initiative aims to detect whether retailers inflate prices in the weeks before the sales period and then ‘reduce’ them back to their original level, in a practice long criticised by consumer organisations.
The Directorate-General for Consumer Affairs is using digital tracking tools to supervise online retailers and identify any price increases applied before Black Friday.
They also look out for ‘drip pricing’, which is when hidden fees are revealed only at checkout.
The ministry is also detecting pressure-selling techniques such as fake countdown timers or false claims of scarcity.
Dynamic pricing systems without transparency and personalised prices based on consumer data are also being scrutinised.
All of these practices, the ministry warns, undermine transparency and are designed to mislead consumers or push them into rushed purchases.
Because of the nature of the offences, the ministry has made public the names of five of the seven sanctioned companies, all fined for breaching the General Law for the Defence of Consumers and Users, which addresses unfair commercial practices.
Fines imposed:
- Notino Italia – €110,000
- Gestaweb 2020 – €100,000
- Media Markt – €25,000
- Carrefour – €21,500
- PC Componentes – €1,500
Alongside the monetary fines, the sanctioned firms have been ordered to withdraw the misleading discounts they advertised at the time.
The ministry is also required to publicly identify the companies as an additional penalty.
Consumer Affairs has reminded retailers that Spanish law requires any discount to be calculated using the lowest price displayed in the previous 30 days, which is the official reference price under Article 20 of the Retail Trade Act.
For the 2025 campaign, the ministry will broaden its scrutiny to include so-called dark patterns: techniques deliberately designed to confuse or manipulate shoppers.
