June 2026 · ~ 6 min read
Your pricing policy is illegal. And it's costing you more than you think
The Omnibus Directive in e-commerce: the legal and business realities every executive must understand
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This article is based on the Polish market. All references to regulatory bodies, fines, and enforcement actions concern the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) and the implementation of the Omnibus Directive under Polish law (effective 1 January 2023). While the Directive applies across all EU member states, specific figures, thresholds, and enforcement practices may differ in other jurisdictions. Readers from other markets should treat the legal specifics as indicative and consult local counsel for country-specific guidance.
The Omnibus Directive has been in force in Poland for over three years. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is actively enforcing the rules, fines are reaching into the millions of zloty, and the first major precedents have already been set. And yet, the majority of online stores are still using pricing tricks straight out of the pre-regulation era. This article is not another legal overview. It is a diagnosis of a costly mistake in thinking – and a guide to fixing it before the regulator does it for you.
Let's start with the uncomfortable facts
The rule is brutally simple: whenever you communicate a price reduction, you must display the lowest price applied during the 30 days prior to the discount. Not the price from last week. Not the so-called regular price you quietly set three days before the sale. The lowest price from the last 30 days. Many stores are not doing this. Or they are doing it wrong.
Raise the price by 30%, announce -25%, and shout about savings. That is not a promotion. That is consumer deception. And now there is a specific financial penalty for it.
UOKiK never sleeps. Since the beginning, the office has launched dozens of proceedings against Polish online stores. Across the European Union, combined fines for similar violations have already exceeded hundreds of millions of euros. Booking.com came under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries simultaneously. Zalando and Temu were fined a combined total of nearly PLN 37 million in Poland alone. The scale of these figures is not accidental – it is a message to the entire market.
10 %
of annual turnover
maximum penalty for large platforms
PLN 2M
personal liability
for members of the management board
IMPORTANTLY:the financial fine is not the worst-case scenario. UOKiK can order the public disclosure of its decision on your homepage. It can demand you immediately cease a practice – in the middle of your peak trading season. It can initiate criminal proceedings against company directors. The combined weight of reputational, operational and legal consequences is far more painful than the fine itself.
THE PENALTY CATALOGUE – WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY FACE IN POLAND:
- Fine of up to 10% of annual turnover for large platforms and retail chains
- Fine of up to 40x the average national salary for smaller operators
- Personal financial liability for management board members up to PLN 2 million
- Mandatory publication of the UOKiK decision on your homepage
- Immediate injunction to cease the practice - including during peak season
- Criminal proceedings against management in extreme cases
Three traps that catch even the biggest retailer
Trap one: the strikethrough price as decoration. The industry-standard 'was/is pricing' - a higher crossed-out price next to a lower current one - is the single most common source of violations. If that crossed-out figure is not the lowest price from the past 30 days, you are breaking the law. Full stop. There is no room for interpretation here.
Trap two: manufactured promotional windows. A product priced at PLN 199 for three weeks, quietly raised to PLN 299 a week before Black Friday, then discounted to PLN 249 and advertised as '50 zloty off'. That is not a legal promotion. It is manipulation - and one that UOKiK's algorithms, and increasingly consumers themselves, can detect in minutes.
Trap three: assuming your platform handled it. Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento - none of these platforms are Omnibus-compliant out of the box. Standard price-history plugins often record data from the moment of installation, not from the actual price change. Stores launched after 1 January 2023 may have been displaying completely incorrect reference prices for their first weeks of operation. A plugin or a good system alone is not enough. You need one that works correctly, and a process that ensures it keeps working after every platform update.
Trap four (my own trap): the belief that transparency will destroy your sales
When I first encountered the legislation and read through the interpretations in order to fully align our pricing display with Omnibus requirements — showing the genuine 30-day minimum rather than the "regular price" — my initial reaction as the person responsible for sales was panic.
And it is hard to blame myself for that. For years, across many CEE markets, price was the primary competitive tool, and promotions chased one another relentlessly. In that environment, a natural question emerged: how do you sell effectively when the reference point is the Omnibus price, and the product is almost permanently running at -10%, -15%, or -20%? For many people, this felt like the end of effective promotional communication.
I had similar doubts. Not because I believed the previous practices were right, but because for years I had been optimising the business around e-commerce metrics such as CR, CTR, COS, and session volume. The entire logic of the market seemed to confirm one assumption: the bigger the discount a brand communicates directly, the stronger the customer response. Moving away from that model felt like dismantling a mechanism that, at least on the surface, worked.
Reality quickly proved those fears wrong.
After implementing full pricing transparency, sales did not just hold steady — the business grew year on year at a triple-digit rate. Average order value (AOV) increased, margins improved, and the store's profitability climbed steadily. Customers simply adapted to the new rules. They bought not because they were chasing an artificially inflated discount or counting down to a promotional deadline, but because the offer was genuinely attractive on its own terms.
The biggest drivers of results turned out to be entirely different from the constant escalation of promotions: consistent brand-building, the development of loyalty programmes, a focus on customer experience, and pricing discipline. Equally important was resisting the temptation to trigger another promotional campaign at every minor deviation from the sales plan.
The most important lesson from this experience is straightforward: the fear of pricing transparency is today more of a reflex from the past than a real business risk. Customers do not punish brands for honesty. Quite the opposite — they reward it, though not always immediately. It shows up in the metrics that truly define the value of a business: customer loyalty, LTV, the quality of the brand relationship, and the level of trust.
If you are hesitating because you believe your customers come only for the big discount number, I invite you to test that assumption — before the regulator does it for you.
This is not just a legal problem. It is a business problem.
This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Store owners who treat Omnibus purely as a compliance issue lose twice. Once by risking a fine. And again by missing a real competitive advantage.
Consumer behaviour research conducted after Omnibus implementation across EU markets reveals a clear trend: shoppers have become more suspicious of online promotions. Every crossed-out price is now evaluated for authenticity. Every big sale is being checked. Price comparison engines, consumer forums, social media posts — the promotion verification ecosystem operates efficiently and without mercy.
A customer who discovers that '50% off' was fiction will not come back. And they will tell everyone they can. The cost of one fake promotion is many times greater than the revenue it was supposed to generate.
But there is another side of this coin that rarely gets discussed. Retailers that adapted proactively — that built transparent pricing policies and communicate them openly — are seeing real business benefits today.
The mechanism is simple: transparent pricing shifts competition away from a race to the lowest price and towards a contest of value and trust. On that playing field, brands win — not deal aggregators. For retailers with ambitions to build a loyal customer base, Omnibus is, paradoxically, good news.
How to sell effectively in the new reality
Transparency does not mean abandoning promotions. It means changing the philosophy behind how they are designed.
Strategy one: stable base price plus planned promotional windows. Design three or four major promotional events per year with at least 45 days' lead time at the pricing policy level. Hold prices steady in between. The 30-day minimum then naturally aligns with the pre-sale price — the communication is honest, and the impact of the big discount is genuine.
Strategy two: value instead of discount. Free shipping, extended warranty, premium packaging, a complementary product. The customer perceives a real benefit, the store does not touch the product's price history, and the margin is protected. A genuine win-win with zero legal risk.
Strategy three: loyalty programmes instead of public price cuts. Personalised discounts for registered users, communicated as a programme benefit rather than a product discount, build loyalty and reduce pressure on the public pricing policy. The customer feels valued. The brand does not devalue its product.
Strategy four: bundles and product sets. A bundle is a new SKU. The bundle price can be compelling without any obligation to display price history for its individual components. With the right product pairing, this simultaneously increases average basket value and protects unit margin.
Time to decide
Three years is long enough that 'I didn't know' no longer works as a defence. UOKiK knows that you know. Your customers know more and more. And your competitors — the ones who got this right — are already building an advantage on the back of it.
The question is no longer whether to comply with Omnibus. The question is: are you going to do it defensively, as a bare minimum, or offensively, as a core element of your brand positioning?
By Karolina — Klodt.
Privacy policy
© 2026 Klodt. Studio
June 2026 · ~ 6 min read
Your pricing policy is illegal. And it's costing you more than you think
The Omnibus Directive in e-commerce: the legal and business realities every executive must understand
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This article is based on the Polish market. All references to regulatory bodies, fines, and enforcement actions concern the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) and the implementation of the Omnibus Directive under Polish law (effective 1 January 2023). While the Directive applies across all EU member states, specific figures, thresholds, and enforcement practices may differ in other jurisdictions. Readers from other markets should treat the legal specifics as indicative and consult local counsel for country-specific guidance.
The Omnibus Directive has been in force in Poland for over three years. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is actively enforcing the rules, fines are reaching into the millions of zloty, and the first major precedents have already been set. And yet, the majority of online stores are still using pricing tricks straight out of the pre-regulation era. This article is not another legal overview. It is a diagnosis of a costly mistake in thinking – and a guide to fixing it before the regulator does it for you.
Let's start with the uncomfortable facts
The rule is brutally simple: whenever you communicate a price reduction, you must display the lowest price applied during the 30 days prior to the discount. Not the price from last week. Not the so-called regular price you quietly set three days before the sale. The lowest price from the last 30 days. Many stores are not doing this. Or they are doing it wrong.
Raise the price by 30%, announce -25%, and shout about savings. That is not a promotion. That is consumer deception. And now there is a specific financial penalty for it.
UOKiK never sleeps. Since the beginning, the office has launched dozens of proceedings against Polish online stores. Across the European Union, combined fines for similar violations have already exceeded hundreds of millions of euros. Booking.com came under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries simultaneously. Zalando and Temu were fined a combined total of nearly PLN 37 million in Poland alone. The scale of these figures is not accidental – it is a message to the entire market.
10 %
of annual turnover
maximum penalty for large platforms
PLN 2M
personal liability
for members of the management board
IMPORTANTLY:the financial fine is not the worst-case scenario. UOKiK can order the public disclosure of its decision on your homepage. It can demand you immediately cease a practice – in the middle of your peak trading season. It can initiate criminal proceedings against company directors. The combined weight of reputational, operational and legal consequences is far more painful than the fine itself.
THE PENALTY CATALOGUE – WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY FACE IN POLAND:
- Fine of up to 10% of annual turnover for large platforms and retail chains
- Fine of up to 40x the average national salary for smaller operators
- Personal financial liability for management board members up to PLN 2 million
- Mandatory publication of the UOKiK decision on your homepage
- Immediate injunction to cease the practice - including during peak season
- Criminal proceedings against management in extreme cases
Three traps that catch even the biggest retailer
Trap one: the strikethrough price as decoration. The industry-standard 'was/is pricing' - a higher crossed-out price next to a lower current one - is the single most common source of violations. If that crossed-out figure is not the lowest price from the past 30 days, you are breaking the law. Full stop. There is no room for interpretation here.
Trap two: manufactured promotional windows. A product priced at PLN 199 for three weeks, quietly raised to PLN 299 a week before Black Friday, then discounted to PLN 249 and advertised as '50 zloty off'. That is not a legal promotion. It is manipulation - and one that UOKiK's algorithms, and increasingly consumers themselves, can detect in minutes.
Trap three: assuming your platform handled it. Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento - none of these platforms are Omnibus-compliant out of the box. Standard price-history plugins often record data from the moment of installation, not from the actual price change. Stores launched after 1 January 2023 may have been displaying completely incorrect reference prices for their first weeks of operation. A plugin or a good system alone is not enough. You need one that works correctly, and a process that ensures it keeps working after every platform update.
Trap four (my own trap): the belief that transparency will destroy your sales
When I first encountered the legislation and read through the interpretations in order to fully align our pricing display with Omnibus requirements — showing the genuine 30-day minimum rather than the "regular price" — my initial reaction as the person responsible for sales was panic.
And it is hard to blame myself for that. For years, across many CEE markets, price was the primary competitive tool, and promotions chased one another relentlessly. In that environment, a natural question emerged: how do you sell effectively when the reference point is the Omnibus price, and the product is almost permanently running at -10%, -15%, or -20%? For many people, this felt like the end of effective promotional communication.
I had similar doubts. Not because I believed the previous practices were right, but because for years I had been optimising the business around e-commerce metrics such as CR, CTR, COS, and session volume. The entire logic of the market seemed to confirm one assumption: the bigger the discount a brand communicates directly, the stronger the customer response. Moving away from that model felt like dismantling a mechanism that, at least on the surface, worked.
Reality quickly proved those fears wrong.
After implementing full pricing transparency, sales did not just hold steady — the business grew year on year at a triple-digit rate. Average order value (AOV) increased, margins improved, and the store's profitability climbed steadily. Customers simply adapted to the new rules. They bought not because they were chasing an artificially inflated discount or counting down to a promotional deadline, but because the offer was genuinely attractive on its own terms.
The biggest drivers of results turned out to be entirely different from the constant escalation of promotions: consistent brand-building, the development of loyalty programmes, a focus on customer experience, and pricing discipline. Equally important was resisting the temptation to trigger another promotional campaign at every minor deviation from the sales plan.
The most important lesson from this experience is straightforward: the fear of pricing transparency is today more of a reflex from the past than a real business risk. Customers do not punish brands for honesty. Quite the opposite — they reward it, though not always immediately. It shows up in the metrics that truly define the value of a business: customer loyalty, LTV, the quality of the brand relationship, and the level of trust.
If you are hesitating because you believe your customers come only for the big discount number, I invite you to test that assumption — before the regulator does it for you.
This is not just a legal problem. It is a business problem.
This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Store owners who treat Omnibus purely as a compliance issue lose twice. Once by risking a fine. And again by missing a real competitive advantage.
Consumer behaviour research conducted after Omnibus implementation across EU markets reveals a clear trend: shoppers have become more suspicious of online promotions. Every crossed-out price is now evaluated for authenticity. Every big sale is being checked. Price comparison engines, consumer forums, social media posts — the promotion verification ecosystem operates efficiently and without mercy.
A customer who discovers that '50% off' was fiction will not come back. And they will tell everyone they can. The cost of one fake promotion is many times greater than the revenue it was supposed to generate.
But there is another side of this coin that rarely gets discussed. Retailers that adapted proactively — that built transparent pricing policies and communicate them openly — are seeing real business benefits today.
The mechanism is simple: transparent pricing shifts competition away from a race to the lowest price and towards a contest of value and trust. On that playing field, brands win — not deal aggregators. For retailers with ambitions to build a loyal customer base, Omnibus is, paradoxically, good news.
How to sell effectively in the new reality
Transparency does not mean abandoning promotions. It means changing the philosophy behind how they are designed.
Strategy one: stable base price plus planned promotional windows. Design three or four major promotional events per year with at least 45 days' lead time at the pricing policy level. Hold prices steady in between. The 30-day minimum then naturally aligns with the pre-sale price — the communication is honest, and the impact of the big discount is genuine.
Strategy two: value instead of discount. Free shipping, extended warranty, premium packaging, a complementary product. The customer perceives a real benefit, the store does not touch the product's price history, and the margin is protected. A genuine win-win with zero legal risk.
Strategy three: loyalty programmes instead of public price cuts. Personalised discounts for registered users, communicated as a programme benefit rather than a product discount, build loyalty and reduce pressure on the public pricing policy. The customer feels valued. The brand does not devalue its product.
Strategy four: bundles and product sets. A bundle is a new SKU. The bundle price can be compelling without any obligation to display price history for its individual components. With the right product pairing, this simultaneously increases average basket value and protects unit margin.
Time to decide
Three years is long enough that 'I didn't know' no longer works as a defence. UOKiK knows that you know. Your customers know more and more. And your competitors — the ones who got this right — are already building an advantage on the back of it.
The question is no longer whether to comply with Omnibus. The question is: are you going to do it defensively, as a bare minimum, or offensively, as a core element of your brand positioning?
By Karolina — Klodt.
Privacy policy
© 2026 Klodt. Studio
June 2026 · ~ 6 min read
Your pricing policy is illegal. And it's costing you more than you think
The Omnibus Directive in e-commerce: the legal and business realities every executive must understand
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This article is based on the Polish market. All references to regulatory bodies, fines, and enforcement actions concern the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) and the implementation of the Omnibus Directive under Polish law (effective 1 January 2023). While the Directive applies across all EU member states, specific figures, thresholds, and enforcement practices may differ in other jurisdictions. Readers from other markets should treat the legal specifics as indicative and consult local counsel for country-specific guidance.
The Omnibus Directive has been in force in Poland for over three years. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is actively enforcing the rules, fines are reaching into the millions of zloty, and the first major precedents have already been set. And yet, the majority of online stores are still using pricing tricks straight out of the pre-regulation era. This article is not another legal overview. It is a diagnosis of a costly mistake in thinking – and a guide to fixing it before the regulator does it for you.
Let's start with the uncomfortable facts
The rule is brutally simple: whenever you communicate a price reduction, you must display the lowest price applied during the 30 days prior to the discount. Not the price from last week. Not the so-called regular price you quietly set three days before the sale. The lowest price from the last 30 days. Many stores are not doing this. Or they are doing it wrong.
Raise the price by 30%, announce -25%, and shout about savings. That is not a promotion. That is consumer deception. And now there is a specific financial penalty for it.
UOKiK never sleeps. Since the beginning, the office has launched dozens of proceedings against Polish online stores. Across the European Union, combined fines for similar violations have already exceeded hundreds of millions of euros. Booking.com came under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries simultaneously. Zalando and Temu were fined a combined total of nearly PLN 37 million in Poland alone. The scale of these figures is not accidental – it is a message to the entire market.
10 %
of annual turnover
maximum penalty for large platforms
PLN 2M
personal liability
for members of the management board
IMPORTANTLY:the financial fine is not the worst-case scenario. UOKiK can order the public disclosure of its decision on your homepage. It can demand you immediately cease a practice – in the middle of your peak trading season. It can initiate criminal proceedings against company directors. The combined weight of reputational, operational and legal consequences is far more painful than the fine itself.
THE PENALTY CATALOGUE – WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY FACE IN POLAND:
- Fine of up to 10% of annual turnover for large platforms and retail chains
- Fine of up to 40x the average national salary for smaller operators
- Personal financial liability for management board members up to PLN 2 million
- Mandatory publication of the UOKiK decision on your homepage
- Immediate injunction to cease the practice - including during peak season
- Criminal proceedings against management in extreme cases
Three traps that catch even the biggest retailer
Trap one: the strikethrough price as decoration. The industry-standard 'was/is pricing' - a higher crossed-out price next to a lower current one - is the single most common source of violations. If that crossed-out figure is not the lowest price from the past 30 days, you are breaking the law. Full stop. There is no room for interpretation here.
Trap two: manufactured promotional windows. A product priced at PLN 199 for three weeks, quietly raised to PLN 299 a week before Black Friday, then discounted to PLN 249 and advertised as '50 zloty off'. That is not a legal promotion. It is manipulation - and one that UOKiK's algorithms, and increasingly consumers themselves, can detect in minutes.
Trap three: assuming your platform handled it. Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento - none of these platforms are Omnibus-compliant out of the box. Standard price-history plugins often record data from the moment of installation, not from the actual price change. Stores launched after 1 January 2023 may have been displaying completely incorrect reference prices for their first weeks of operation. A plugin or a good system alone is not enough. You need one that works correctly, and a process that ensures it keeps working after every platform update.
Trap four (my own trap): the belief that transparency will destroy your sales
When I first encountered the legislation and read through the interpretations in order to fully align our pricing display with Omnibus requirements — showing the genuine 30-day minimum rather than the "regular price" — my initial reaction as the person responsible for sales was panic.
And it is hard to blame myself for that. For years, across many CEE markets, price was the primary competitive tool, and promotions chased one another relentlessly. In that environment, a natural question emerged: how do you sell effectively when the reference point is the Omnibus price, and the product is almost permanently running at -10%, -15%, or -20%? For many people, this felt like the end of effective promotional communication.
I had similar doubts. Not because I believed the previous practices were right, but because for years I had been optimising the business around e-commerce metrics such as CR, CTR, COS, and session volume. The entire logic of the market seemed to confirm one assumption: the bigger the discount a brand communicates directly, the stronger the customer response. Moving away from that model felt like dismantling a mechanism that, at least on the surface, worked.
Reality quickly proved those fears wrong.
After implementing full pricing transparency, sales did not just hold steady — the business grew year on year at a triple-digit rate. Average order value (AOV) increased, margins improved, and the store's profitability climbed steadily. Customers simply adapted to the new rules. They bought not because they were chasing an artificially inflated discount or counting down to a promotional deadline, but because the offer was genuinely attractive on its own terms.
The biggest drivers of results turned out to be entirely different from the constant escalation of promotions: consistent brand-building, the development of loyalty programmes, a focus on customer experience, and pricing discipline. Equally important was resisting the temptation to trigger another promotional campaign at every minor deviation from the sales plan.
The most important lesson from this experience is straightforward: the fear of pricing transparency is today more of a reflex from the past than a real business risk. Customers do not punish brands for honesty. Quite the opposite — they reward it, though not always immediately. It shows up in the metrics that truly define the value of a business: customer loyalty, LTV, the quality of the brand relationship, and the level of trust.
If you are hesitating because you believe your customers come only for the big discount number, I invite you to test that assumption — before the regulator does it for you.
This is not just a legal problem. It is a business problem.
This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Store owners who treat Omnibus purely as a compliance issue lose twice. Once by risking a fine. And again by missing a real competitive advantage.
Consumer behaviour research conducted after Omnibus implementation across EU markets reveals a clear trend: shoppers have become more suspicious of online promotions. Every crossed-out price is now evaluated for authenticity. Every big sale is being checked. Price comparison engines, consumer forums, social media posts — the promotion verification ecosystem operates efficiently and without mercy.
A customer who discovers that '50% off' was fiction will not come back. And they will tell everyone they can. The cost of one fake promotion is many times greater than the revenue it was supposed to generate.
But there is another side of this coin that rarely gets discussed. Retailers that adapted proactively — that built transparent pricing policies and communicate them openly — are seeing real business benefits today.
The mechanism is simple: transparent pricing shifts competition away from a race to the lowest price and towards a contest of value and trust. On that playing field, brands win — not deal aggregators. For retailers with ambitions to build a loyal customer base, Omnibus is, paradoxically, good news.
How to sell effectively in the new reality
Transparency does not mean abandoning promotions. It means changing the philosophy behind how they are designed.
Strategy one: stable base price plus planned promotional windows. Design three or four major promotional events per year with at least 45 days' lead time at the pricing policy level. Hold prices steady in between. The 30-day minimum then naturally aligns with the pre-sale price — the communication is honest, and the impact of the big discount is genuine.
Strategy two: value instead of discount. Free shipping, extended warranty, premium packaging, a complementary product. The customer perceives a real benefit, the store does not touch the product's price history, and the margin is protected. A genuine win-win with zero legal risk.
Strategy three: loyalty programmes instead of public price cuts. Personalised discounts for registered users, communicated as a programme benefit rather than a product discount, build loyalty and reduce pressure on the public pricing policy. The customer feels valued. The brand does not devalue its product.
Strategy four: bundles and product sets. A bundle is a new SKU. The bundle price can be compelling without any obligation to display price history for its individual components. With the right product pairing, this simultaneously increases average basket value and protects unit margin.
Time to decide
Three years is long enough that 'I didn't know' no longer works as a defence. UOKiK knows that you know. Your customers know more and more. And your competitors — the ones who got this right — are already building an advantage on the back of it.
The question is no longer whether to comply with Omnibus. The question is: are you going to do it defensively, as a bare minimum, or offensively, as a core element of your brand positioning?
By Karolina — Klodt.
Privacy policy
© 2026 Klodt. Studio
Insight
articles
June 2026 · ~ 6 min read
Your pricing policy is illegal. And it's costing you more than you think
The Omnibus Directive in e-commerce: the legal and business realities every executive must understand
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This article is based on the Polish market. All references to regulatory bodies, fines, and enforcement actions concern the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) and the implementation of the Omnibus Directive under Polish law (effective 1 January 2023). While the Directive applies across all EU member states, specific figures, thresholds, and enforcement practices may differ in other jurisdictions. Readers from other markets should treat the legal specifics as indicative and consult local counsel for country-specific guidance.
The Omnibus Directive has been in force in Poland for over three years. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is actively enforcing the rules, fines are reaching into the millions of zloty, and the first major precedents have already been set. And yet, the majority of online stores are still using pricing tricks straight out of the pre-regulation era. This article is not another legal overview. It is a diagnosis of a costly mistake in thinking – and a guide to fixing it before the regulator does it for you.
Let's start with the uncomfortable facts
The rule is brutally simple: whenever you communicate a price reduction, you must display the lowest price applied during the 30 days prior to the discount. Not the price from last week. Not the so-called regular price you quietly set three days before the sale. The lowest price from the last 30 days. Many stores are not doing this. Or they are doing it wrong.
Raise the price by 30%, announce -25%, and shout about savings. That is not a promotion. That is consumer deception. And now there is a specific financial penalty for it.
UOKiK never sleeps. Since the beginning, the office has launched dozens of proceedings against Polish online stores. Across the European Union, combined fines for similar violations have already exceeded hundreds of millions of euros. Booking.com came under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries simultaneously. Zalando and Temu were fined a combined total of nearly PLN 37 million in Poland alone. The scale of these figures is not accidental – it is a message to the entire market.
10 %
of annual turnover
maximum penalty for large platforms
PLN 2M
personal liability
for members of the management board
IMPORTANTLY:the financial fine is not the worst-case scenario. UOKiK can order the public disclosure of its decision on your homepage. It can demand you immediately cease a practice – in the middle of your peak trading season. It can initiate criminal proceedings against company directors. The combined weight of reputational, operational and legal consequences is far more painful than the fine itself.
THE PENALTY CATALOGUE – WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY FACE IN POLAND:
- Fine of up to 10% of annual turnover for large platforms and retail chains
- Fine of up to 40x the average national salary for smaller operators
- Personal financial liability for management board members up to PLN 2 million
- Mandatory publication of the UOKiK decision on your homepage
- Immediate injunction to cease the practice - including during peak season
- Criminal proceedings against management in extreme cases
Three traps that catch even the biggest retailer
Trap one: the strikethrough price as decoration. The industry-standard 'was/is pricing' - a higher crossed-out price next to a lower current one - is the single most common source of violations. If that crossed-out figure is not the lowest price from the past 30 days, you are breaking the law. Full stop. There is no room for interpretation here.
Trap two: manufactured promotional windows. A product priced at PLN 199 for three weeks, quietly raised to PLN 299 a week before Black Friday, then discounted to PLN 249 and advertised as '50 zloty off'. That is not a legal promotion. It is manipulation - and one that UOKiK's algorithms, and increasingly consumers themselves, can detect in minutes.
Trap three: assuming your platform handled it. Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento - none of these platforms are Omnibus-compliant out of the box. Standard price-history plugins often record data from the moment of installation, not from the actual price change. Stores launched after 1 January 2023 may have been displaying completely incorrect reference prices for their first weeks of operation. A plugin or a good system alone is not enough. You need one that works correctly, and a process that ensures it keeps working after every platform update.
Trap four (my own trap): the belief that transparency will destroy your sales
When I first encountered the legislation and read through the interpretations in order to fully align our pricing display with Omnibus requirements — showing the genuine 30-day minimum rather than the "regular price" — my initial reaction as the person responsible for sales was panic.
And it is hard to blame myself for that. For years, across many CEE markets, price was the primary competitive tool, and promotions chased one another relentlessly. In that environment, a natural question emerged: how do you sell effectively when the reference point is the Omnibus price, and the product is almost permanently running at -10%, -15%, or -20%? For many people, this felt like the end of effective promotional communication.
I had similar doubts. Not because I believed the previous practices were right, but because for years I had been optimising the business around e-commerce metrics such as CR, CTR, COS, and session volume. The entire logic of the market seemed to confirm one assumption: the bigger the discount a brand communicates directly, the stronger the customer response. Moving away from that model felt like dismantling a mechanism that, at least on the surface, worked.
Reality quickly proved those fears wrong.
After implementing full pricing transparency, sales did not just hold steady — the business grew year on year at a triple-digit rate. Average order value (AOV) increased, margins improved, and the store's profitability climbed steadily. Customers simply adapted to the new rules. They bought not because they were chasing an artificially inflated discount or counting down to a promotional deadline, but because the offer was genuinely attractive on its own terms.
The biggest drivers of results turned out to be entirely different from the constant escalation of promotions: consistent brand-building, the development of loyalty programmes, a focus on customer experience, and pricing discipline. Equally important was resisting the temptation to trigger another promotional campaign at every minor deviation from the sales plan.
The most important lesson from this experience is straightforward: the fear of pricing transparency is today more of a reflex from the past than a real business risk. Customers do not punish brands for honesty. Quite the opposite — they reward it, though not always immediately. It shows up in the metrics that truly define the value of a business: customer loyalty, LTV, the quality of the brand relationship, and the level of trust.
If you are hesitating because you believe your customers come only for the big discount number, I invite you to test that assumption — before the regulator does it for you.
This is not just a legal problem. It is a business problem.
This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Store owners who treat Omnibus purely as a compliance issue lose twice. Once by risking a fine. And again by missing a real competitive advantage.
Consumer behaviour research conducted after Omnibus implementation across EU markets reveals a clear trend: shoppers have become more suspicious of online promotions. Every crossed-out price is now evaluated for authenticity. Every big sale is being checked. Price comparison engines, consumer forums, social media posts — the promotion verification ecosystem operates efficiently and without mercy.
A customer who discovers that '50% off' was fiction will not come back. And they will tell everyone they can. The cost of one fake promotion is many times greater than the revenue it was supposed to generate.
But there is another side of this coin that rarely gets discussed. Retailers that adapted proactively — that built transparent pricing policies and communicate them openly — are seeing real business benefits today.
The mechanism is simple: transparent pricing shifts competition away from a race to the lowest price and towards a contest of value and trust. On that playing field, brands win — not deal aggregators. For retailers with ambitions to build a loyal customer base, Omnibus is, paradoxically, good news.
How to sell effectively in the new reality
Transparency does not mean abandoning promotions. It means changing the philosophy behind how they are designed.
Strategy one: stable base price plus planned promotional windows. Design three or four major promotional events per year with at least 45 days' lead time at the pricing policy level. Hold prices steady in between. The 30-day minimum then naturally aligns with the pre-sale price — the communication is honest, and the impact of the big discount is genuine.
Strategy two: value instead of discount. Free shipping, extended warranty, premium packaging, a complementary product. The customer perceives a real benefit, the store does not touch the product's price history, and the margin is protected. A genuine win-win with zero legal risk.
Strategy three: loyalty programmes instead of public price cuts. Personalised discounts for registered users, communicated as a programme benefit rather than a product discount, build loyalty and reduce pressure on the public pricing policy. The customer feels valued. The brand does not devalue its product.
Strategy four: bundles and product sets. A bundle is a new SKU. The bundle price can be compelling without any obligation to display price history for its individual components. With the right product pairing, this simultaneously increases average basket value and protects unit margin.
Time to decide
Three years is long enough that 'I didn't know' no longer works as a defence. UOKiK knows that you know. Your customers know more and more. And your competitors — the ones who got this right — are already building an advantage on the back of it.
The question is no longer whether to comply with Omnibus. The question is: are you going to do it defensively, as a bare minimum, or offensively, as a core element of your brand positioning?
By Karolina — Klodt.
© 2026 Klodt. Studio
Privacy policy
Insight
articles
June 2026 · ~ 6 min read
Your pricing policy is illegal. And it's costing you more than you think
The Omnibus Directive in e-commerce: the legal and business realities every executive must understand
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This article is based on the Polish market. All references to regulatory bodies, fines, and enforcement actions concern the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) and the implementation of the Omnibus Directive under Polish law (effective 1 January 2023). While the Directive applies across all EU member states, specific figures, thresholds, and enforcement practices may differ in other jurisdictions. Readers from other markets should treat the legal specifics as indicative and consult local counsel for country-specific guidance.
The Omnibus Directive has been in force in Poland for over three years. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is actively enforcing the rules, fines are reaching into the millions of zloty, and the first major precedents have already been set. And yet, the majority of online stores are still using pricing tricks straight out of the pre-regulation era. This article is not another legal overview. It is a diagnosis of a costly mistake in thinking – and a guide to fixing it before the regulator does it for you.
Let's start with the uncomfortable facts
The rule is brutally simple: whenever you communicate a price reduction, you must display the lowest price applied during the 30 days prior to the discount. Not the price from last week. Not the so-called regular price you quietly set three days before the sale. The lowest price from the last 30 days. Many stores are not doing this. Or they are doing it wrong.
Raise the price by 30%, announce -25%, and shout about savings. That is not a promotion. That is consumer deception. And now there is a specific financial penalty for it.
UOKiK never sleeps. Since the beginning, the office has launched dozens of proceedings against Polish online stores. Across the European Union, combined fines for similar violations have already exceeded hundreds of millions of euros. Booking.com came under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries simultaneously. Zalando and Temu were fined a combined total of nearly PLN 37 million in Poland alone. The scale of these figures is not accidental – it is a message to the entire market.
10 %
of annual turnover
maximum penalty for large platforms
PLN 2M
personal liability
for members of the management board
IMPORTANTLY:the financial fine is not the worst-case scenario. UOKiK can order the public disclosure of its decision on your homepage. It can demand you immediately cease a practice – in the middle of your peak trading season. It can initiate criminal proceedings against company directors. The combined weight of reputational, operational and legal consequences is far more painful than the fine itself.
THE PENALTY CATALOGUE – WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY FACE IN POLAND:
- Fine of up to 10% of annual turnover for large platforms and retail chains
- Fine of up to 40x the average national salary for smaller operators
- Personal financial liability for management board members up to PLN 2 million
- Mandatory publication of the UOKiK decision on your homepage
- Immediate injunction to cease the practice - including during peak season
- Criminal proceedings against management in extreme cases
Three traps that catch even the biggest retailer
Trap one: the strikethrough price as decoration. The industry-standard 'was/is pricing' - a higher crossed-out price next to a lower current one - is the single most common source of violations. If that crossed-out figure is not the lowest price from the past 30 days, you are breaking the law. Full stop. There is no room for interpretation here.
Trap two: manufactured promotional windows. A product priced at PLN 199 for three weeks, quietly raised to PLN 299 a week before Black Friday, then discounted to PLN 249 and advertised as '50 zloty off'. That is not a legal promotion. It is manipulation - and one that UOKiK's algorithms, and increasingly consumers themselves, can detect in minutes.
Trap three: assuming your platform handled it. Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento - none of these platforms are Omnibus-compliant out of the box. Standard price-history plugins often record data from the moment of installation, not from the actual price change. Stores launched after 1 January 2023 may have been displaying completely incorrect reference prices for their first weeks of operation. A plugin or a good system alone is not enough. You need one that works correctly, and a process that ensures it keeps working after every platform update.
Trap four (my own trap): the belief that transparency will destroy your sales
When I first encountered the legislation and read through the interpretations in order to fully align our pricing display with Omnibus requirements — showing the genuine 30-day minimum rather than the "regular price" — my initial reaction as the person responsible for sales was panic.
And it is hard to blame myself for that. For years, across many CEE markets, price was the primary competitive tool, and promotions chased one another relentlessly. In that environment, a natural question emerged: how do you sell effectively when the reference point is the Omnibus price, and the product is almost permanently running at -10%, -15%, or -20%? For many people, this felt like the end of effective promotional communication.
I had similar doubts. Not because I believed the previous practices were right, but because for years I had been optimising the business around e-commerce metrics such as CR, CTR, COS, and session volume. The entire logic of the market seemed to confirm one assumption: the bigger the discount a brand communicates directly, the stronger the customer response. Moving away from that model felt like dismantling a mechanism that, at least on the surface, worked.
Reality quickly proved those fears wrong.
After implementing full pricing transparency, sales did not just hold steady — the business grew year on year at a triple-digit rate. Average order value (AOV) increased, margins improved, and the store's profitability climbed steadily. Customers simply adapted to the new rules. They bought not because they were chasing an artificially inflated discount or counting down to a promotional deadline, but because the offer was genuinely attractive on its own terms.
The biggest drivers of results turned out to be entirely different from the constant escalation of promotions: consistent brand-building, the development of loyalty programmes, a focus on customer experience, and pricing discipline. Equally important was resisting the temptation to trigger another promotional campaign at every minor deviation from the sales plan.
The most important lesson from this experience is straightforward: the fear of pricing transparency is today more of a reflex from the past than a real business risk. Customers do not punish brands for honesty. Quite the opposite — they reward it, though not always immediately. It shows up in the metrics that truly define the value of a business: customer loyalty, LTV, the quality of the brand relationship, and the level of trust.
If you are hesitating because you believe your customers come only for the big discount number, I invite you to test that assumption — before the regulator does it for you.
This is not just a legal problem. It is a business problem.
This is where it gets genuinely interesting. Store owners who treat Omnibus purely as a compliance issue lose twice. Once by risking a fine. And again by missing a real competitive advantage.
Consumer behaviour research conducted after Omnibus implementation across EU markets reveals a clear trend: shoppers have become more suspicious of online promotions. Every crossed-out price is now evaluated for authenticity. Every big sale is being checked. Price comparison engines, consumer forums, social media posts — the promotion verification ecosystem operates efficiently and without mercy.
A customer who discovers that '50% off' was fiction will not come back. And they will tell everyone they can. The cost of one fake promotion is many times greater than the revenue it was supposed to generate.
But there is another side of this coin that rarely gets discussed. Retailers that adapted proactively — that built transparent pricing policies and communicate them openly — are seeing real business benefits today.
The mechanism is simple: transparent pricing shifts competition away from a race to the lowest price and towards a contest of value and trust. On that playing field, brands win — not deal aggregators. For retailers with ambitions to build a loyal customer base, Omnibus is, paradoxically, good news.
How to sell effectively in the new reality
Transparency does not mean abandoning promotions. It means changing the philosophy behind how they are designed.
Strategy one: stable base price plus planned promotional windows. Design three or four major promotional events per year with at least 45 days' lead time at the pricing policy level. Hold prices steady in between. The 30-day minimum then naturally aligns with the pre-sale price — the communication is honest, and the impact of the big discount is genuine.
Strategy two: value instead of discount. Free shipping, extended warranty, premium packaging, a complementary product. The customer perceives a real benefit, the store does not touch the product's price history, and the margin is protected. A genuine win-win with zero legal risk.
Strategy three: loyalty programmes instead of public price cuts. Personalised discounts for registered users, communicated as a programme benefit rather than a product discount, build loyalty and reduce pressure on the public pricing policy. The customer feels valued. The brand does not devalue its product.
Strategy four: bundles and product sets. A bundle is a new SKU. The bundle price can be compelling without any obligation to display price history for its individual components. With the right product pairing, this simultaneously increases average basket value and protects unit margin.
Time to decide
Three years is long enough that 'I didn't know' no longer works as a defence. UOKiK knows that you know. Your customers know more and more. And your competitors — the ones who got this right — are already building an advantage on the back of it.
The question is no longer whether to comply with Omnibus. The question is: are you going to do it defensively, as a bare minimum, or offensively, as a core element of your brand positioning?
By Karolina — Klodt.
© 2026 Klodt. Studio
Privacy policy
Insight
articles