E-Commerce Practices That Are Illegal in the UK

We originally wrote this in 2014, when the EU Consumer Rights Directive had just been implemented in the UK. The law has moved on considerably since, and in one direction: the things you are not allowed to do at checkout have expanded, and the regulator can now fine you directly rather than having to take you to court.

Photo by N Voitkevich on Pexels

If you sell online to UK consumers, this is the current position.

What applies now

Two pieces of law do most of the work.

The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 still apply. They survived Brexit and cover the information you must give before a sale and the customer’s right to cancel a distance purchase.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 is the significant change. Its consumer protection provisions came into force on 6 April 2025, and they hand the Competition and Markets Authority the power to investigate, order redress and impose fines directly, up to 10% of global turnover. Previously the CMA had to go to court. It no longer does.

That change of enforcement matters more than any individual rule. Consumer law that was widely ignored because nothing happened is now consumer law with a regulator that can fine you.

Drip pricing: the big one

This is where most shops are at risk, and it is stricter than people expect.

You must show the total price up front, including every mandatory fee, tax or charge the customer cannot avoid. Not at checkout. In the first price they see, which includes adverts, emails, listing pages and category pages.

A charge is mandatory if the customer has to pay it to buy the thing. Booking fees, service fees and unavoidable delivery charges all count. Adding them later, or showing a headline price with “plus fees”, is what the Act targets.

This is not theoretical. The CMA’s first financial penalty under the Act went to AA Driving School and BSM, who were fined £4.2 million and ordered to pay over £760,000 in refunds to more than 80,000 learner drivers over exactly this.

What this means practically: if delivery is genuinely optional or genuinely varies by destination, you can still charge it separately, but you must be transparent about it early and clearly. Where a charge applies to everyone, it belongs in the headline price. If you sell tax-inclusive to consumers, make sure your listing pages show the tax-inclusive figure and not the ex-VAT one.

Fake and hidden reviews

Also new under the DMCC Act, and also actively enforced. Publishing reviews that do not reflect genuine experience is banned, as is concealing that a review was incentivised, and as is suppressing negative reviews while publishing positive ones.

There is an active obligation here, not just a prohibition: you are expected to take reasonable steps to check that the reviews you publish are genuine. Requiring a verified purchase is the simplest way to meet it. The CMA allowed a grace period until July 2025 for businesses to get their processes in order; that has long passed.

Sneaking items into the basket

Still illegal, and still occasionally seen. You cannot add a product or service to someone’s basket and rely on them to opt out, whether through a pre-ticked box, a default-selected option or an extra that appears at a later step.

Anything the customer is buying, they must have actively chosen. Pre-ticked consent boxes are separately a problem under data protection law, and the same rule applies to consent for analytics and advertising cookies, which should default to denied until the visitor actively chooses.

Subscriptions and recurring payments

Selling a subscription is fine. Selling what looks like a one-off purchase that quietly renews is not.

The customer must understand at the point of purchase that they are entering a recurring commitment, what it costs, and how often it recurs. Free trials that roll into paid subscriptions need particular care, because that is where most complaints originate.

The DMCC Act contains a further set of subscription contract rules covering reminders before renewal and easier exit. These were not part of the April 2025 commencement and are expected to follow separately, so if you run subscriptions it is worth watching for the implementation date rather than assuming the current position is the final one.

The right to cancel

For most distance sales to consumers there is a 14 day cooling off period during which the customer can withdraw without giving a reason, running from the day the goods are received. You must tell them this before they buy, and provide a means of exercising it. If you fail to tell them, the period extends dramatically.

There are exceptions, including personalised goods, perishables and digital content the customer has agreed to receive immediately, but they are narrower than most merchants assume. Check rather than assume yours qualifies.

If you run CubeCart, recent releases added a built-in Right of Withdrawal workflow that attaches the request to the order and timestamps the acknowledgement, which is a considerably better position to be in than a support inbox if a cancellation is ever disputed.

A practical checklist

1. Look at your category and product pages as a customer. Is the price shown the price they will pay, including everything unavoidable?
2. Walk your own checkout to completion. Note anything that appears for the first time on the final step.
3. Check nothing is pre-selected or pre-ticked anywhere in the flow.
4. Confirm your cancellation rights are stated before purchase, not just in terms nobody opens.
5. If you take reviews, confirm you are not filtering out the bad ones and that incentivised reviews are labelled.
6. If you sell subscriptions, confirm the recurring nature is unmistakable at the point of sale.

Selling into the EU

If you ship to EU consumers you are dealing with EU rules as well as UK ones, and they have diverged since 2020. The Omnibus Directive brought its own requirements around price reduction claims and review transparency. Broadly, a shop built to comply with the current UK position will not be far off, but “not far off” is not the same as compliant, and it is worth proper advice if the EU is a meaningful share of your sales.

The short version

Show the real price early, do not add things people did not choose, be straight about recurring charges, and do not interfere with your reviews. None of that is difficult. What has changed is that the CMA can now fine you for getting it wrong, and has started doing so.

Selling online is what we do: our e-commerce solutions cover hosting, design and the shopping cart platforms behind them.

This is general information rather than legal advice. If you are unsure where your shop stands, take proper advice. If you host with us and want a second pair of eyes on your checkout flow, get in touch.