On 06 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (“the DMCCA”) comes into effect. It’s now critical that businesses inspect their consumer obligations, especially with regards to customer reviews and pricing displays. The punishments for non-compliance can be severely detrimental to businesses, with the Competitions and Markets Authority (“the CMA”) being granted new powers to fine businesses £300,000 for non-compliance, or 10% of global annual turnover—whichever is higher.

The Act comes into force amidst the context of a trend towards greater consumer protections, and the UK’s response to the EU’s New Deal for Consumers. Therefore, the impact of this Act coming into force for businesses wishing to continue trade in the UK is particularly significant.

The Act includes information on commercial practices which are in all circumstances considered unfair. There are no excuses or exemptions available for non-compliance of unfair practices within this context. Two of the key unfair commercial practices which appear in different parts of the Act are as follows:

1. False or incentivised reviews

The UK government found in 2023 that up to 15% of all reviews for 3 common product categories are fake. In turn, they found that fake review text causes an estimated £50 million to £312 million in total annual harm to UK consumers. The aim of the DMCCA is to ban fake and misleading consumer reviews to protect consumers who are otherwise influenced to make a transactional decision.

E-commerce platforms must now take reasonable and proportionate steps to remove and prevent consumers from encountering fake reviews; and to prevent any other information being presented on their platforms, that is determined or influenced by reviews being false or capable of misleading consumers. Businesses selling to consumers via e-commerce platforms are also implicated. No evidence of a fake review’s effect on the average consumer is required for this commercial practice to be considered unfair. Additionally, the Act goes further and prohibits consumer reviews that conceal the fact that they have been incentivised. For example, if a consumer is paid or given favourable future discounts to write a review, this must be disclosed.

2. Drip-pricing – the banning of an enticing, reduced headline price

So called ‘drip pricing’ refers to the practice of presenting consumers a reduced initial price for a product and then introducing additional, compulsory charges (such as fees and tax charges) before the product gets to the consumer. This practice is now banned. Even where the final price can’t be calculated, information about additional charges must appear with equal prominence as a headline price, so that the consumer is aware of how to calculate the total price before being baited in by an artificially lower price.

Is your business equipped to prevent the publication of fake reviews and drip pricing?

Within the context of running a business that advertises its product on an online marketplace, it becomes necessary that your business isn’t subject to false positive reviews that could artificially inflate its reputation and ability to appear as a ‘suggested’ vendor, in turn influencing consumers to make transactional decisions. Additionally, prices must be presented in a clear and holistic way at point of initial advertisement (headline price stage). Inspecting your business’ reviews for fakes as well as your policies and procedures around soliciting reviews through incentives, will drive additional compliance necessities due to the nature of these legislative changes. Moreover, it may be necessary to amend your sales and marketing practices to ensure that your display of prices isn’t misleading or enticing of a customer to ‘bite’ (make a transactional decision) before finding out that there are necessary additional charges that they need to incur before making a purchase.

Next steps:

The Competitions and Markets Authority will soon release an Approach document which will set out the CMA’s enforcement priorities for the first 12 months of the new regime. The CMA will be in charge of investigating, determining and taking enforcement action such as issuing fines to businesses in order to address:

• infringements under the DMCCA;
• breaches of undertakings given to the CMA;
• breaches of CMA direct enforcement directions;
• providing false or misleading information in connection with the CMA’s exercise of a direct enforcement function;
• non-compliance with statutory information notices.

Subscription contracts

The DMCCA also heavily impacts the provision of subscription contracts. While the new law will come into force in 2026, it would be prudent to understand your obligations under the new Act now. For more information please click here.

How can we help?

For further information, or to discuss the issues raised within this article, please contact us to speak to a member of our Regulatory Team. We have a broad range of experience offering training and compliance masterclasses and act for clients on a wide range of regulatory matters.