Discounts in your online shop: the German 30-day price rule

The provision sits in Section 11 of the German Price Indication Ordinance and is shorter than its reputation suggests. Anyone obliged to state a total price has to indicate, whenever announcing a price reduction for goods, the lowest total price applied to consumers within the last 30 days (PAngV) before the reduction takes effect. Three words in that sentence decide almost every dispute: lowest, total, applied. Lowest means the minimum across the period, not the price that happened to be valid last. Total means the price including VAT and other price components, not a net figure and not a price stripped of mandatory surcharges. Applied means actually charged to consumers, not merely listed in a price sheet or calculated internally. Anyone who models those three terms cleanly in the shop has the larger part of the work behind them.

The rule is not a German special case. It goes back to Article 6a of the European Price Indication Directive, inserted by the amending directive: the prior price is the lowest price applied by the trader during a period of at least 30 days (EU Directive 2019/2161) before the price reduction is applied. Member states have had to apply these provisions since 28 May 2022 (EU Directive 2019/2161); the recast German ordinance entered into force on 28 May 2022 (PAngV). For goods that have been on the market for less than 30 days (EU Directive 2019/2161), member states may provide for a shorter period — an opening that shows the legislator had newly launched items in mind.

That reasoning by the European Commission (European Commission) matters more in practice than any detail question, because it supplies the yardstick a court applies to a campaign. The question is not whether a struck price was valid at some point, but whether the reduction is economically what it claims to be. A brief price increase a few days before the campaign formally produces a higher prior price — but it delivers exactly the pattern the provision is meant to prevent, and it does not affect the 30-day low in any case. The reference value stays the minimum across the whole period.

For years the most practically important question of interpretation was this: does the advertised percentage also have to relate to the 30-day low, or is it enough to name the low somewhere nearby? The Court of Justice of the European Union decided the point on 26 September 2024 (Court of Justice of the European Union). The answer was unambiguous: a price reduction presented as a percentage or as a promotional statement emphasising the advantageous nature of the price offer must be determined on the basis of the prior price within the meaning of Article 6a. The percentage is therefore not a free marketing figure next to the mandatory notice but a regulated statement in its own right.

The underlying case shows how small the amounts in dispute can be. A trader advertised a sale price of EUR 1.29 (Court of Justice of the European Union), next to it the struck-through last selling price of EUR 1.69 (Court of Justice of the European Union), and the lowest total price of the preceding 30 days was likewise EUR 1.29. The advertised percentage reduction was therefore calculated against the last selling price instead of against the 30-day low, compared with which there was no reduction at all. For shop implementation one plain consequence follows: percentage, struck price and saving in euros must not come from three different sources. They all have to be derived from the same reference value.

The requirements add up to a price block that lends itself to standardisation. The sale price sits at the top as the total price, with the struck reference price and the percentage beside it. Immediately below comes the mandatory notice that the struck price is the lowest total price of the last 30 days, then the unit price and the statements on VAT and shipping costs. Spatial proximity matters: the notice has to sit where the price is perceived, not in a collapsible area at the foot of the page and not behind an asterisk that only resolves after scrolling.

The price block does not stand alone. It shares the product page with the mandatory statements from product safety law, which we broke down in a separate article on GPSR and ProdSG, and with the details on payment and shipping. Both areas compete for the same space above the fold. Adding them one after another without a concept produces a page on which the purchase decision drowns in the small print — with measurable consequences, as the article on cart abandonment shows.

The Price Indication Ordinance carries fines. A breach of the obligation under Section 11(1) (PAngV) is expressly listed as an administrative offence. The framework comes from the German Act on Economic Offences: the offence may be punished with a fine of up to EUR 25,000 (WiStG 1954). That is the upper edge rather than the standard case — but it is high enough that the matter does not fall into the category of venial formalities.

Alongside it stands fair trading law. Its fining provision, however, presupposes a widespread infringement and applies only within a coordinated enforcement action: on those conditions the German Act Against Unfair Competition allows a fine of up to EUR 50,000 (UWG); where the trader achieved more than EUR 1.25 million (UWG) in annual turnover in the member states concerned, up to 4 per cent (UWG) of annual turnover is possible. For the faulty price display of a single trader this is typically not the route. There the most frequent case in practice is a warning letter from a competitor or an association, which requires no authority and arrives considerably faster than an administrative fine.

The European framework behind it is just as clear. The amending directive requires, for widespread infringements, a maximum fine of at least 4 % of annual turnover (EU Directive 2019/2161) of the trader in the member states concerned; where no turnover information is available, a maximum fine of at least EUR 2 million (EU Directive 2019/2161) has to be provided for. These figures target cross-border campaigns rather than the individual trader with a badly configured badge. They do show, though, how much weight the legislator attaches to correct price statements.

How often disputes actually arise can be read from the work of the German fair competition association: 54 per cent (Wettbewerbszentrale) of enquiries and complaints in 2024 concerned an allegation of misleading conduct, and across all subject areas 1,362 cases (Wettbewerbszentrale) were formally objected to; price statements and price advertising appear there as one of the example topics, without a case figure of their own. Price display is therefore not a niche topic for the legal department but one of the two fields in which competitors watch each other most closely. Anyone who has their shop looked after continuously moves that check out of chance and into a fixed rhythm.

The real work lies not in the wording on the product page but in the data model behind it. What is needed is a price history per item and sales channel that records every applied total price with a start and an end. From that history the reference price can be calculated as the minimum across a rolling window instead of being typed in by hand when a campaign is created. The difference is not cosmetic: a manually maintained field is stale by the time of the next price change, a calculated value is not.

In this example the reference price is EUR 39.90 even though EUR 49.90 was charged immediately before the campaign. That gap is exactly where most implementations fail: the system knows the prior price but not the minimum. The saving is therefore EUR 5 and not EUR 15, and the percentage reads 13 per cent instead of 30 per cent. Both values can be calculated from the record once the reference price is fixed — and both are wrong if it is pulled from the master record.

Anyone running several sales locations has the additional case of prices differing by site; the article on location pages for multiple sites describes how such structures can be modelled cleanly. We covered the remaining mandatory statements around ordering and provider identification in the articles on payment methods in an online shop and on legal notice requirements; anyone additionally advertising with environmental claims will find the requirements in the article on environmental claims on websites. Discount campaigns also affect return behaviour, as the article on returns in online shops shows. If you would like to work through your price display in a structured way: our online shop services show how price history and display can be joined up, our pricing is stated openly, the full range of services gives an overview, and we are happy to discuss the specific case directly with you.