Fictitious original prices are deception
Aliases: fictitious pricing · fake strikethrough price · was/now pricing
What it is
An "original price" never actually charged, or only hung for a token moment, is a fictitious reference price: formally a price comparison (strikethrough original plus current price), functionally the installation of a nonexistent history as the judgment baseline. What it crosses is the line between persuasion and deception, not the line between good and bad outcomes — persuasion works with references that genuinely exist (a real past selling price, a checkable price history); deception manufactures one. Anchoring works in an interface only while the reference price is believed to be a real historical price, and the fictitious original destroys exactly that premise — which makes it information falsification, not a presentational technique built on real references.
Why it happens
A strikethrough price moves judgment because users default to reading it as "the price it once sold for," and that default turns the original into a semantic anchor — it injects the premise "this is what the product is normally worth," around which the discount size and the purchase decision are computed. The fictitious original borrows against that default. Viewed once, an inflated strikethrough enlarges the perceived discount and lifts conversion; the cost lands at the level of the reference-price system: after catching one fabrication, users downgrade their trust in all strikethroughs, every subsequent was-price gets discounted in turn, genuine promotions are collateral damage, and the reference-price system as a whole devalues. The structure trades short-term conversion for long-term credibility: invisible transaction by transaction, accumulating in the platform's comparison machinery — and once trust devalues, repairing it costs far more than the fabricated prices ever earned.
Studying it
- Paradigm: reference-price experiments — the same current price paired with external references of different levels (plausible inflation, gross inflation, no reference), measuring perceived savings, willingness to pay, and belief in the reference itself; another line tracks how internal reference prices are shaped by price history — where long-running promotions drag users' price expectations, and whether expectations recover after promotions end.
- Variables: the gap between reference and current price, disclosure of the reference's authenticity (whether a transaction record is shown); outcomes are perceived savings, purchase intention, credibility ratings, and expressed skepticism.
- Methodological cautions: the lab can show that moderate inflation goes undetected while steadily enlarging perceived savings, with doubt emerging only at grosser exaggerations — but these are single-shot, short-horizon measurements. The long-run claim that "users as a whole learn to ignore strikethroughs" lacks longitudinal evidence; current support is mechanism-level reasoning plus individual cases (enforcement actions over fictitious pricing, practitioners observing was-price fatigue). Keep the two layers separate when writing conclusions.
Where it stops holding
Regulatory boundary: fictitious reference prices face a clear and consistent regulatory direction across most markets — advertising and price-display rules generally require a listed "original price" to be a price genuinely charged, with transaction records and a reasonable duration, and hanging a high price briefly before restoring the regular price counts as fictitious all the same. Specific statutes and enforcement intensity vary by market, and a cross-border product checks each market individually, but the direction does not move: reference prices must be verifiable. Judgment also has a gray band: a product that really did sell at the original price but is permanently on sale may be legal and still amount to manipulative price theater — an original price never actually transacted at sits between compliance and manipulation, and a design judgment cannot stop at "not illegal." Evidence boundary: the long-run devaluation argument lacks longitudinal data and must not be used as established fact.
Applying it
- Make "every strikethrough is verifiable" a publishing standard: before any was-price goes up, check the transaction record (when, on which channel, in what volume); if the record cannot be produced, drop the strikethrough or switch to a verifiable phrasing such as "lowest price in the last 30 days," grounded in your own sales data.
- Label the reference's source and window: "30-day average transaction price" resists challenge far better than a bare strikethrough — and forces the reference to be real.
- Audit the live interface: sweep every strikethrough and original-price field, spot-check them against transaction records, and take unverifiable ones offline; remove was-prices when the promotion ends instead of letting them settle into permanent decoration.
- To validate: sample live strikethroughs and trace them back to real transactions — an order at that price must exist; and monitor behavioral response to strikethroughs over time (clicks, comparison opens, ignore rates) — sustained decline in attention and trust means the reference-price system has already devalued, which surfaces before any regulator finds it.