A Shop With a Countdown Timer That Never Ends

The site

An online shop selling phone cases, screen protectors, chargers and cables for the most common models. Two people run it from a rented unit in an industrial park.

Across the top of every page is a red bar: flash sale ends in 02:59:41, with the seconds ticking down. Every product shows a sale price beside a higher one struck through.

Reload the page and the clock reads 02:59:59 again. Click through to a product and it starts over. Come back tomorrow, on another phone, and there are still three hours to go.

The sale has been on since January. The clock has never reached zero for anyone.

The inference a visitor makes

Most visitors never notice. They see a deadline, feel a little pressure, and either buy or leave.

The ones who notice are often the most careful buyers: people comparing cases across several shops, who open the same product twice, on two devices, over two days.

When they see the clock restart, they do not conclude that a widget is misconfigured. They conclude that the shop is willing to invent things to make a sale.

Then they read everything else in that light: the struck-through prices, the five-star reviews, the claim that a case survives a fall. Nothing on the page has changed, but none of it is believed now.

A customer who catches a clock lying has a story to tell, and a review is the obvious place to tell it.

What the red bar claims

The bar is a line of text and a clock, but it makes several claims at once.

• That there is a sale, with prices lower than usual.
• That the sale ends at a particular moment.
• That the moment is soon, within the next three hours.
• That prices go back up when the clock runs out.
• That everyone sees the same deadline, since it is presented as a fact.

The fourth is the one any visitor can test by coming back another day, and it is false. Prices on this shop have not gone up once since the bar appeared.

Where the clock came from

The timer is an app from the store platform's marketplace, installed for a Boxing Day sale last year. It offered two modes: count down to a fixed date, or start a fresh countdown for each visit.

When the fixed date ran out, somebody switched to the second mode so the bar would not disappear. The app calls it an evergreen timer, which describes it exactly.

Nobody decided to mislead anyone. A setting was chosen to keep a banner on the screen, and the banner went on making its claim to every visitor for ten months.

Why false urgency is a legal risk

Canada's Competition Act forbids false or misleading claims to the public when promoting a product or a business. A price claim on a website counts like any other.

The Act looks at the general impression a claim creates, not only its literal words. A ticking clock gives the impression that the price ends soon, whatever the small print says.

The Competition Bureau enforces it, and the penalties available are substantial.

Whether a particular claim crosses the line is for a lawyer to say, and what is written here is general information, not legal advice. But a deadline that never arrives is not a claim any shop should want to explain.

A permanent sale has no regular price

The struck-through prices make a second claim: that the higher figure is what each case normally sells for.

The Act has specific rules for that kind of comparison. Broadly, a regular price has to be one the product has genuinely sold at in good numbers, or been offered at in good faith for a substantial time.

A shop on sale since January has been selling at the sale price for most of the year. The higher figure describes a price few customers have recently paid, if any.

Urgency that is true

Real deadlines are useful to customers, and a shop has plenty of them.

A sale with an end date and time, stated in words with the time zone, and kept. A clock is fine too, if it counts down to that same moment for everybody and the prices change when it reaches zero.

A dispatch cut-off: order by two in the afternoon, Pacific time, and it ships today. That is urgency a customer can check, and it is true every weekday.

Stock levels taken from the real inventory, shown only when they are low. A counter that always says three left is the same problem as the clock.

A worked example

The owners found out from an email. A customer had taken a screenshot of the bar on a Tuesday and again on the Thursday, both showing just under three hours, and asked which was true.

They removed the timer that afternoon and went through the rest of the shop for claims that depended on a setting rather than a fact.

The struck-through prices came off every product where the higher price had not been charged in months, and the low stock line was switched to read the real inventory.

Sales now run for stated periods, announced in the newsletter with a start and an end date. The bar shows the end in words, and when the sale finishes, the bar and the prices change together.

The rest of the year, the bar says when orders ship.

The counter-case within the site

A countdown is not wrong in itself. A shop running a genuine weekend sale can show a clock counting to the real end, and customers will find it useful.

A shop that rarely runs sales can do without urgency devices altogether. Clear prices, honest shipping times and a plain returns policy do more for a careful buyer.

And an end date written in words works almost as well as a clock, with nothing to misconfigure.

Whatever the format, the rule holds: a deadline on the page has to be a deadline in fact.

What to change

1. Open the shop on two devices, a day apart.
2. Remove any timer that restarts.
3. Check every struck-through price against what was charged.
4. Run sales with a real start and end.
5. State the end in words, with the time zone.
6. Show stock counts only from real inventory.
7. Use the bar for dispatch cut-offs instead.

Step three is the one most often missed once the clock has gone. The timer is easy to spot and delete; the struck-through prices go on making their claim on every product page.

A widget left running long after anyone checked it is also the trouble in a guest house site whose calendar shows no rooms.

Frequently asked questions

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