On 11 August the District Court ordered Brand Developers Ltd, the company behind The TV Shop and brands including Thin Lizzy and Transforma Ladder, to pay $1,104,000. Part of it was for something plenty of business owners would not recognise as illegal. Staff posted positive reviews of the company’s products without disclosing that they worked there, in some cases for products they had not used. The company also kept the bad ones off its own website. Reviews of one, two or three stars were not published unless the customer replied to a follow-up email, and for a period during 2020, according to the Commerce Commission, no low rating reviews were published at all.
Judge Belinda Sellars KC called the conduct “deliberate and systematic”, finding that “BDL made concerted and repeated efforts to improve the online rating and reviews of its products and thereby deliberately mislead consumers”. Commerce Commission Deputy Chair Anne Callinan was equally direct. “When you have staff post reviews without disclosing their affiliation, or when you remove negative reviews, you are effectively tricking potential customers,” she said.
What strikes me about the case, having spent my working life around the machinery that produces this stuff, is how ordinary the mechanism was. Nobody had to build anything. Holding a review until someone approves it is a setting. Publishing only the four and five star ones is a decision made in an admin screen by whoever is looking after the website that month. The distance between a normal moderation queue and an offence is about three clicks and a policy nobody wrote down.
That gap matters more this year than last, because the Commission has said plainly where it is looking. On 22 July it presented its enforcement and compliance priorities for 2026/27, and two of the five specific priorities reach directly into what happens on a website. Under online sales conduct, the Commission says it “will prioritise taking action to protect consumers from on-line sales practices such as fake reviews, misleading scarcity claims, misleading social proof sales tactics, drip pricing, and subscription traps”. A separate priority covers pricing and promotional practices, targeting anything that misleads consumers “about price, savings or urgency”.
Read that list again with a web developer’s eye. Fake reviews is a moderation setting. Misleading scarcity claims is a countdown timer or a stock bar. Misleading social proof is the popup in the corner saying somebody in Hamilton just bought this. Drip pricing is where the shipping and the booking fee appear on the last screen. Subscription traps are a checkout flow and a cancellation page. Every one of them is a feature installed in an afternoon by somebody who has never read the Fair Trading Act and was asked to lift the conversion rate.
The timing is not accidental. NZ Post’s Business IQ team reported on 28 July that online spending in the first half of 2026 was up 12 per cent year on year, more than six times the growth in physical stores, at over $6 billion. When that much money moves through interfaces customers cannot independently verify, the interface becomes the thing worth regulating.
The Commission’s guidance on online sales practices is unusually specific, and worth reading with your own site open in another tab. If you claim there is 23 hours and 49 minutes remaining for an offer then “the offer must finish at that time. The clock should not restart.” A stock indicator “should not be programmed to change regardless of how much stock is sold or left in stock”. On social proof it is blunter still. “If you claim that 12 people are viewing a product now there must be 12 people viewing that product at that time and not simply 12 people on your website.”
Now look at what the tools do. HurryTimer, a countdown plugin with around 20,000 active WordPress installations, advertises evergreen timers where “each visitor sees their own unique countdown, no matter when they visit”, an auto-restart option on revisit, and recurring timers in its paid tier that “automatically reset and start again” on a schedule you choose. There is nothing improper about the software, and a per-visitor deadline the shop genuinely honours is a real deadline. But that requires the price to actually change when the clock hits zero for that person, and the second half of the job is almost never built. The timer goes on the page because it works. Nobody wires it to the pricing table.
None of this outlaws urgency. A real sale with a real end time is fine, and a stock counter reading live from inventory is better than fine because it is useful. What the law objects to is the claim that cannot be substantiated, which is the polite way of saying the number somebody made up.
There is precedent, and it predates the current priorities by years. In September 2022 the online retailer 1-Day, described by the Commission at the time as owned by The Warehouse Group, was fined $840,000 over daily deals promoted for today only that often rolled over for days, and a stock indicator programmed to fall through the morning and reset to 100 per cent at noon. The Commission’s worked example is forensic. 1-Day had 1,994 sets of Apple EarPods available, sold 501 across ten days and never dropped below 75 per cent of stock, while the bar on the page showed between 10 and 19 per cent every morning. Judge Winter found the offending wilful, and that it gave the company an unfair advantage over competitors who did not use pressure selling. 1-Day dropped both features after the Commission made contact and has since amalgamated, trading as TheMarket.
That last finding is the argument I would put to any client who treats this as a compliance nuisance. A fake countdown does not just mislead the customer, it takes business off the competitor down the road who was honest about their stock. If you are the honest one, this enforcement is on your side.
Anyone selling across the Tasman gets the message twice, because on 19 February the ACCC named manipulative and false practices in digital markets among its own 2026/27 priorities. Nor is the problem rare. When the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network swept 642 traders’ sites and apps in early 2024, it found 75.7 per cent used at least one dark pattern.
So here is an audit you can run this afternoon. Open your site in a private browsing window, let any countdown reach zero and see whether the price changes. If it does not, that timer is making a claim you cannot back up. Ask whoever controls your review queue what happens to a one star review, and if the answer involves the word “usually”, you have a policy problem that predates any software. Check whether your stock indicator reads inventory or runs an animation, note the gap between the price advertised and the total at checkout, then try to cancel a subscription without phoning anyone.
Breaches of the Fair Trading Act carry a maximum fine of $600,000 per offence for a business, and the penalties handed down have now run past a million. An hour spent checking whether your website is telling the truth is cheap by comparison, and the answer is usually that most of it is. It is the two or three widgets someone installed to lift conversions that nobody has looked at since.
Roger McSaveney is General Manager of Forge Creative, an Auckland web design and development agency.
Have you found a countdown timer or stock counter on your own site that does not match reality? Tell us what you found in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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