How to spot a fake RRP
Half the "discounts" in UK retail are against a price nobody ever paid. Here is how to tell.
A recommended retail price is exactly that: recommended. Manufacturers set it, retailers can ignore it, and many do in both directions. The problem for a shopper is that "was £499, now £299" looks like a £200 saving even when the product has never sold for £499 in the United Kingdom.
Why RRPs drift
Three things push RRPs above real prices. First, manufacturers set them high to leave room for retailer promotions: a 40 percent discount that still leaves margin looks better in an advert than a 10 percent one. Second, some retailers use their own "was" price rather than the RRP, and set it to whatever the product was listed at for a few days months ago. Third, currency and component costs move, and RRPs are rarely revised downwards.
The Advertising Standards Authority's rule is that a "was" price must be a genuine price the product was sold at for a reasonable period. In practice the rule is enforced after the fact, and the test of "reasonable" is loose. So the label is a claim, not a fact.
The four checks
1. Price history. The only reliable test is what the product has actually sold for. Every deal page on this site records the retailer's price daily; if a "drop" takes the price to a level it has been at before, it's rotation, not a reduction. If it's the lowest we've recorded, it's real.
2. The Amazon check. For most consumer products Amazon UK is the largest single seller, and its price is a fair proxy for the market. We show it next to the retailer's price for the same product code. A retailer that's 30 percent below its own RRP but level with Amazon is at market price, not below it.
3. Watches and small appliances. These two categories carry the most inflated RRPs in UK retail. A fashion watch at "60 percent off" is at its normal price; the interesting event is when it goes to 70. A stand mixer with a £499 RRP has probably never sold above £350. Treat the RRP as noise and look at the history.
4. Exclusive codes. Retailers sometimes list a near-identical product under their own model code so it can't be price-matched. If a product appears at one retailer only and the code is one letter off the manufacturer's, the comparison is against nothing.
What we do about it
We drop deals where the gap against Amazon is implausible — a retailer is never genuinely 70 percent below Amazon on a comparable item; that's a data error. We check the product title matches the Amazon listing before we compare. And we show the history so you can make the call yourself.
PriceDrop UK editorial · published 13 September 2026 · prices referenced were checked 19 Oct 2026
