Australian camera and electronics retailer digiDirect has paid $99,000 in penalties and admitted, in a court-enforceable undertaking, that "price slashed" discounts on its website misled consumers, Australia's competition regulator said on 21 September 2026. The higher prices struck through on the product pages had rarely been advertised and almost never charged.

In Short

An Australian electronics shop showed a higher price crossed out next to a lower one, but it had hardly ever advertised or sold anything at that higher price, so the saving on offer was not real. Australia's consumer regulator made the company pay $99,000 and sign a promise, enforceable in court, to stop, and it is still investigating other shops caught in the same holiday sales checks. The case adds to a run of penalties this year treating a crossed-out "was" price as a factual claim that has to match what a shop actually charged.

A $229 keyboard that rarely cost $229

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said that Digital Imaging Express Pty Ltd, which trades as digiDirect, paid $99,000 after the regulator issued it with five infringement notices for allegedly misleading discount claims. All amounts in the case are Australian dollars. The outcome was published on Monday, 21 September 2026, as media release 109/26, filed under the topics of advertising and promotions, buying and selling products and services, compliance and enforcement, and pricing.

The conduct took place on digiDirect's website. According to the ACCC, the retailer advertised certain electronic products as discounted from a higher price that was struck through and used the words "price slashed", when in fact the products "were rarely advertised and almost never sold at the higher price."

The regulator published one example in detail. A mini wireless keyboard was advertised at $149 against a struck-through $229. A screenshot published with the release identifies it as the Logitech MX Mechanical Mini Wireless Keyboard - Tactile Quiet, SKU 148254, shipped by digiDirect. The $229.00 figure appears beneath a small "Price Slashed" label and is crossed out, while the selling price of $149.00 sits alongside under the heading "digiDirect Price". On those numbers the implied saving was $80, or roughly 35 percent of the higher figure.

Three other products were named: a camera, a camera and lens kit, and a Bluetooth remote control camera accessory. The ACCC gave no brands or models for those items. Nor did it say how many products were affected in total, over what period the prices ran, how many units sold, or how the five notices map onto the four products described. The release uses the word "included", which leaves open whether the list is complete.

Two further details in the screenshot sit close to the price. Directly under the add-to-cart button, a line reads "Found a better price? Click here and watch us try to beat it." Below that is a panel of payment options: card and PayPal buttons, a Zip line offering the keyboard "from $10/week", an Afterpay button, and a Latitude interest-free option alongside UnionPay, Alipay and WeChat Pay marks. The release does not raise the payment options; the regulator's concern was the price used to measure the discount.

"digiDirect's advertising may have misled consumers into thinking they were getting a genuine discount when in reality the products were rarely advertised and almost never sold at the higher strikethrough price, and the suggested discount was illusory," ACCC Deputy Chair Mick Keogh said.

"Misleading discount and savings claims can influence consumers to buy from a particular retailer because they are misled into believing they are getting a good deal, rather than shopping around to find a genuine discount or the best available price."

That second remark reads differently beside the product page itself. The screen that displayed the struck-through $229 also offered to try to beat any lower price a shopper found elsewhere. The ACCC did not comment on the price-beat line.

Alleged, then admitted

The wording of the release shifts between its first and second paragraphs. The five notices were issued over "allegedly misleading" claims. In the next paragraph, digiDirect "admitted that its discount claims were misleading, in breach of the Australian Consumer Law."

The two statements are not in conflict; they describe different instruments. Payment of an infringement notice penalty does not, in legal terms, constitute an admission of a contravention, a point PPC Land set out when eDreams paid $59,400 over free trial charges. The admission arrives through the second instrument, a court-enforceable undertaking given to the ACCC. Such undertakings turn a commitment into something the regulator can enforce through the courts.

According to the ACCC, digiDirect undertakes not to make misleading strikethrough discount claims and to implement a consumer law compliance program. That is the full description the release provides. It does not state the term of the undertaking, and it mentions neither refunds nor corrective notices to consumers. Other recent undertakings have gone further. The eDreams instrument, accepted on 24 June 2026, runs for three years and opened a refund path for consumers who signed up from November 2021, while Hismile's undertaking required a public notice on its website and social platforms about the ACCC action. Whether digiDirect's document contains comparable terms cannot be determined from the release alone.

The release also names no specific provision. It says only that the conduct breached the Australian Consumer Law. Section 18 of that law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct and section 29 covers false representations about price; either could apply to a misleading comparison price, but the ACCC did not say which it relied on.

$19,800 a notice

The ACCC did not break the $99,000 down by notice. Divided evenly across five, it comes to $19,800 each, and that figure recurs throughout the regulator's infringement notice work in 2026. PhotobookShop paid $39,600 across two notices in March for instructing influencers to hide paid partnerships. Hismile paid $138,600 across seven in June for staff presented as members of the public. WeFlex paid $19,800 for a single notice over an NDIS funding advertisement, eDreams $59,400 across three, and HSK United $79,200 across four for strikethrough prices and refund statements. Each total divides to the same $19,800.

Infringement notices carry fixed amounts and spare the regulator from proving its case before a judge. Across these cases the per-notice amount has not varied, so the totals track the number of notices issued rather than the size of the business or the revenue at stake.

A second pricing case since 2021

digiDirect has been here before. In June 2021, according to the ACCC, the company paid $39,240 after the regulator issued it with three infringement notices over misleading representations about "storewide" sales. That works out at an average of $13,080 a notice. The 2026 total is about 2.5 times larger, spread across five notices rather than three.

The subject has moved, too. The 2021 matter concerned how a sale was described - claims that it was storewide. The 2026 matter goes to the integrity of the number used to calculate a saving. The release describes the earlier case only in terms of penalties. The later one adds an admission and a court-enforceable undertaking.

According to the ACCC, digiDirect sells photographic equipment and other electronic goods through an online store and seven physical stores in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. It forms part of the larger digiDirect Group, which also includes the Australian businesses Booktopia, Mwave and James Bennett. The notices and the undertaking are directed at Digital Imaging Express Pty Ltd; the release says nothing about pricing displays at the group's other businesses.

Found in a Black Friday sweep

The ACCC first became aware of digiDirect's strikethrough pricing during a sweep of retailers' sales claims made during the Black Friday sales. The case was therefore detected through the regulator's own monitoring rather than a consumer complaint.

Which Black Friday? The release does not say. Its background section records that the ACCC ran sweeps of sales claims during the end-of-year sales periods in both 2024 and 2025, including Black Friday and Boxing Day, and that it "is continuing to investigate several retailers about the claims they made." The digiDirect case could have originated in either year. The release does not name the other retailers.

The 2025 exercise was set out by Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe on 10 November 2025. Its targets included countdown timers that did not match actual sale durations, storewide claims with undisclosed exclusions, "up to" discounts where the maximum applied to few products, and strikethrough prices for products that had not previously sold at the higher price for a reasonable period. The 2024 sweep produced penalties for Michael Hill, My House and Hairhouse in June 2025, as PPC Land recorded in its coverage of the ACCC's 2026-27 enforcement priorities. Those priorities, presented on 19 February 2026, named subscription traps and dark patterns alongside misleading pricing, and singled out pricing accuracy in supermarkets. Keogh's warning that the ACCC is "actively monitoring for misleading pricing claims in the retail and supermarkets sectors" repeats that language.

The calendar gives the timing some weight. Black Friday falls on 27 November 2026, 67 days after the digiDirect release. Before it comes Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days on 6 and 7 October, a members-only event covering 22 countries, Australia among them.

Two tests in one sentence

The ACCC's description of the conduct measures the struck-through price in two ways: how often it was advertised, and how often goods sold at it. For digiDirect the answers were "rarely" and "almost never." The release gives no numeric threshold and no look-back window, and it does not date the conduct.

That phrase, "almost never", has appeared in a much larger case. When the Federal Court ordered Emma Sleep entities to pay $15 million on 24 April 2026, it found that 58 of 74 products had never been offered at their strikethrough prices, and the remaining 16 had almost never been sold at them. Emma Sleep's conduct ran from 15 June 2020 to 27 March 2023, involved countdown timers as well as strikethrough prices, and generated more than $134 million in revenue from more than 243,000 products sold. Proceedings were filed; a court set the penalty at $7.5 million for each of two entities.

HSK United sits closer to digiDirect in scale. The ACCC found that products on its Pain Free Aussies and Modern Aussies sites had not been sold at the higher strikethrough price since at least 1 January 2025; one listed a cooling blanket at $79.99 against $160. That matter ended with four notices, two of them on pricing, and no admission.

The release does not explain why digiDirect's conduct was handled through notices and an undertaking rather than proceedings. The distance between the two routes is large. Court penalties for companies can reach the greatest of $50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30 percent of adjusted turnover during the breach period, and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Doubling Penalties for ACCC Enforcement) Act 2026, passed on 26 March 2026, lifted the fixed limb to $100 million for conduct from 28 March 2026. Because the digiDirect release does not date the conduct, it is not possible to say which penalty regime would have applied had the matter gone to court.

Where the struck-through number travels

For advertisers, a reference price is rarely confined to one product page. In Google's shopping feeds it is carried by the price attribute, with the discounted figure in sale_price, and Google then decides whether to render the higher number with a strikethrough. For Australia, Google requires the base price to have been valid for 30 days within the previous 200, which need not be consecutive, and the discount to be greater than 5 percent and less than 90 percent. The keyboard's 35 percent sits inside that band. The release does not say whether digiDirect's struck-through prices ever appeared in Shopping ads or free listings; its findings concern the retailer's own website.

The two checks do not measure the same thing. Google's rule looks at how long a base price was in effect. The ACCC's description of digiDirect looked at advertising frequency and at actual sales. A figure that clears a platform's display threshold is not, by that fact, a figure consumers regularly paid.

Amazon has moved closer to a sales-based view. Under rules Amazon set out on 31 March 2026, a seller's List Price has, since 23 April, had to match a recent price at another retailer or a price customers actually paid for the Featured Offer on Amazon, while the Typical Price behind the "Was - Now" display is a median of non-promotional prices paid over 90 days. Structured data keeps the figures apart: Google's merchant listing markup, as clarified in February 2025, separates an active price, a higher price marked with the StrikethroughPrice type, and member prices.

Litigation elsewhere tests similar ground. In the United States, a January 2025 class action alleged that Patagonia kept 16 products on continuous sale for 98 days without offering them at their stated reference prices, and Mattress Firm settled a California class action over inflated original prices used between 2020 and 2024 while denying wrongdoing.

What the release leaves open

For all its brevity, release 109/26 settles two things. digiDirect has admitted the strikethrough claims were misleading, and it has paid $99,000. Much else is left out: the period of the conduct, the number of products and sales involved, the term of the undertaking, any consumer redress, and the identity of the retailers still under investigation from the 2024 and 2025 sweeps.

The last of those gaps matters most for the months ahead. digiDirect is the latest retailer to reach a public outcome from the end-of-year sweeps, with several more still under investigation and Black Friday 2026 approaching. How many of those files end in notices, and how many in court?

Timeline

Summary

Who: Digital Imaging Express Pty Ltd, trading as digiDirect, an Australian retailer of photographic equipment and electronics with an online store and seven physical stores, part of the digiDirect Group alongside Booktopia, Mwave and James Bennett. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission issued the notices and accepted the undertaking; Deputy Chair Mick Keogh was quoted.

What: digiDirect paid $99,000 in penalties under five infringement notices and, in a court-enforceable undertaking, admitted that strikethrough discount claims on its website breached the Australian Consumer Law. Products including a Logitech keyboard advertised at $149 against a struck-through $229 had rarely been advertised and almost never sold at the higher price. The undertaking commits digiDirect not to make misleading strikethrough discount claims and to run a consumer law compliance program.

When: The ACCC published the outcome on 21 September 2026 as release 109/26. The conduct was identified in a Black Friday sweep; the release does not specify whether it was the 2024 or 2025 sweep, nor the dates of the conduct. digiDirect previously paid $39,240 over "storewide" sale claims in June 2021.

Where: digiDirect's Australian website, with the retailer operating stores in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.

Why: A struck-through price implies that a product was genuinely offered and bought at the higher figure. According to the ACCC, digiDirect's suggested discounts were illusory and could draw consumers away from shopping around. The case lands two months before Black Friday 2026, with several retailers from the 2024 and 2025 sweeps still under investigation.