ASA complaint about misleading discounted products
Tuesday 17th June 2025
A product page for a set of pans on the Tefal website www.tefal.co.uk, seen on 5 February 2025, stated “£139.99 SAVE £190.01 Was: £330.00”. The ad featured images of the product with the superimposed text “RED HOT DEAL”. Underneath the images was further information, including an email icon next to the claim “SIGN UP FOR 15% OFF”. Clicking on the icon revealed a pop-up box with the text “Sign up for 15% off. That’s right… signup and SAVE, instantly! T&Cs apply, excludes Clearance. Minimum spend applies. Subscribe to our email Newsletter and receive 15% off your first purchase from the Tefal online shop”.
The complainant, who was unable to use the 15% discount offer against the advertised product, challenged whether the ad was misleading.
Tefal stated that text in the pop-up box should have included a disclaimer which stated that “Red Hot Deals” were excluded from the 15% discount promotion. They said they had updated the text to read “T&Cs apply, excludes Red Hot Deals & Clearance offers”.
The ASA upheld the complaint and said it considered that consumers would understand the claim “SIGN UP FOR 15% OFF”, which was on the product page for a set of pans, to mean that if they signed up to Tefal, they would receive a 15% discount that could be used on that product. Whilst consumers might have expected there to have been some exclusions when using a discount offer, we considered the use of the claim on that page strongly implied that it could be used on the pans. We further considered the positioning of the “SIGN UP” icon directly underneath images of the product reinforced that impression.