Your strikethrough prices are a factual claim. PriceProof keeps the receipts.

What you actually get, and what you do not

Most of what is sold as compliance software is a scan that returns a verdict. This is not that, and it would be dishonest to dress it up as that, so here is the mechanical truth in one paragraph. We fetch your public product pages on a daily schedule. We read two numbers off each one: the price being asked, and the compare-at price being struck through. We append both to a history with a timestamp. We then run three deterministic checks against that history, and anything that matches is recorded as an observation carrying the exact window it was observed over.

Observations, not verdicts. Nothing we send you says violation, illegal, or non-compliant, because we are not in a position to know any of those things. A finding says what we saw and over how long, and links the guidance relevant to the jurisdictions you told us about. Citing a rule next to an observation is not a statement that you broke it, and PriceProof is not legal advice — the decision about what any of it means is yours and your counsel’s.

Displayed prices only, never transactions. We read the same public pages your customers see. We never see orders, we never see what anyone actually paid, and we have no route to that data. So we can never tell you that a reference price was or was not genuinely charged to a real buyer. We can only tell you what was shown on the page, on the days we looked.

Nothing from before you enrol is visible to us. Ever. The observation window starts the moment you add your store and there is no way to backfill it. If you enrol today, today’s window is zero days wide and worth nothing, and we will say so rather than dressing up a single page-load as history. That is also the honest argument for starting sooner rather than later: the window only grows forward.

Nothing is emailed until a finding’s window reaches 14 days. Below that width, a genuine two-week sale and a permanent fake anchor look identical in our data, so sending would be guessing, and a guess with a statute printed beside it is worse than silence. Findings are recorded from day one and held, not discarded, then released once the window is wide enough to distinguish the two cases.

We will not catch everything. A price that changes between two daily observations is invisible to us. A page we cannot fetch is not observed at all. A password-protected store cannot be monitored. Anyone promising complete coverage of a catalog from outside that catalog is describing something they cannot do.

What counts as a “fake discount” under U.S. law

A strikethrough or “was/now” price on a Shopify product page is a factual claim: the seller is asserting the product previously sold at a specific higher amount, and the current amount is a real reduction from that reference. The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, codified at 16 CFR Part 233 (the FTC’s longest-standing consumer-protection guidance on this specific question), makes that a deceptive practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act when the reference price was not a bona fide, substantial-volume prevailing price the seller genuinely offered for a reasonable prior period.

Every state layers additional rules on top of the federal baseline. California Business & Professions Code §17501 is the strictest of the frequently-litigated statutes: it treats a “was” price as deceptive unless the higher amount was actually charged for a reasonable period of time in the three months immediately preceding the sale. New York General Business Law §349 sweeps in any deceptive act or practice in trade or commerce and has supported private class actions against ecommerce sellers for pattern-of-conduct fake-discount claims. For cross-border sellers into the European Union, the EU Omnibus Directive (Article 6a of the Consumer Rights Directive) requires that any announced price reduction show the lowest price the seller applied during the 30 days preceding the reduction, not the highest.

In plain terms, a Shopify store that ships a $79 shirt at “$79 (was $149)” is only in the clear if that store can show it actually offered the shirt at $149 for a defensible recent stretch, a stretch that, depending on where the buyer is, ranges from a “reasonable prior period” (FTC) to 30 days (EU Omnibus) to 90 days (California). A permanently-strikethrough “was” price the store never actually charged, or only charged for a token 24 hours to unlock the higher anchor, is the exact scenario the Guides Against Deceptive Pricing were written to address.

Why merchant risk is going up right now

Reference-pricing compliance is not a new area of law, the FTC guidance dates to 1964, but enforcement activity has visibly re-intensified over the last two years, with a mix of FTC advertising and marketing guidance refreshes, state attorney general actions, and a growing docket of private class actions filed under state consumer-protection statutes. Retailers of the scale of Wayfair, Best Buy, Nike, and Shein have each faced 2026 filings alleging permanent-strikethrough-price patterns. Those cases settle, or they don’t, but either way the discovery burden of proving a defensible reference-price history for every SKU on a catalog of tens of thousands is real and expensive.

Mid-market Shopify merchants are not being sued because they specifically decided to run fake discounts. In almost every operator conversation this pattern shows up because the “compare-at price” field on a Shopify product was set once by a copy-paste from a vendor sheet, or by a launch-day promotion that ended six months ago, or by a bulk import from an old catalog, and nobody has audited the field since. Shopify’s admin UI renders the strikethrough exactly the same way whether the reference is a bona fide prior price or a made-up anchor. There is no built-in Shopify feature that flags the “compare-at” against a compliant recent-price history, because Shopify itself does not claim to enforce state or federal reference-pricing law on merchants’ behalf.

That is the gap PriceProof watches. Every product we can reach on your storefront gets a daily price record. Every displayed compare-at price is compared against the history we have accumulated since you enrolled — not against a claim about what you charged before that, which we have no way to know. Where a check matches, you get an observation stating what we saw and over how many days, with the guidance for the jurisdictions you declared linked beside it. What you do with that is your call: leave the reference alone, drop the strikethrough, or lower the compare-at to something your own records support. We do not make that call, and we do not pretend the observation settles it.

Why the price-history database is the whole point

A compliance tool that just reads your Shopify catalog once, right now, cannot tell you whether a “compare-at $149” is defensible. The defensibility test is historical: what did this SKU actually sell for during the 30, 60, or 90 days before the reduction was displayed? That evidence has to be captured on a recurring schedule, timestamped, and stored, not reconstructed after the fact. Every week a merchant does not have a price-history capture running on their catalog is a week of forensic evidence they cannot go back and produce if a state AG or a class action asks for it.

PriceProof runs a daily catalog scan that records the displayed selling price and compare-at price on every product it can reach, and uses that accumulated record as the only ground truth it will reason from. The longer it runs on your catalog, the more the phrase “we observed this for N days” is worth. That accumulating record is the product — not the individual scan, and not the individual observation. It is also why the first two weeks are quiet on purpose: a window that narrow cannot separate a real sale from a permanent anchor, so we hold what we find rather than send you a coin flip.

Pricing

$49/mo for one storefront, month to month. One tier, no annual lock-in, no per-SKU metering. Cancel any time from your account — access runs to the end of the period you already paid for.

Here is the reasoning, because a price with no reasoning behind it is just a number someone picked. Our TariffWatch Watchlist is $29/mo and monitors one feed. PriceProof does materially more work per subscriber — every product on your storefront, fetched every day — so it cannot honestly sit at $29. It also delivers a smaller surface than our PixelProof mid tier at $99/mo, which ships a browser extension and a library of paste-ready fixes; PriceProof ships neither. And the thing you are really buying, the observation window, is worth nothing on day one and only becomes worth something over a month or more. $49/mo is priced against what this does at day 30, not against what it might do at some later milestone.

We would rather raise this later, with a reason attached, than start high and quietly discount. If the window gets long enough that findings carry real weight, that is a genuine price-increase story and we will tell it out loud.

What setup looks like

After checkout you land on a page that asks for two things. First, your public storefront domain — the pages your customers see, not your admin URL. Second, which jurisdictions this store sells into: ships to California, ships to the EU, or neither. You declare that yourself with two checkboxes, and we never infer it from your domain, your currency or your shipping zones. Applying California’s three-month reference-price rule to a merchant who does not sell there would be inventing a legal posture on their behalf and then reporting against it.

The declaration decides which guidance we link beside a finding. It does not change what we observe, and it is not a legal determination about your store. The FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing are linked as the federal baseline whether or not you tick anything.

The first scan runs the next morning. From then on, every day, the same two numbers off every product page we can reach, appended to your history. The first thing worth reading arrives around two weeks in, because that is when the window is first wide enough to be worth reading.

PriceProof is a sibling product to PixelProof, which monitors Shopify Meta pixel, GA4, and GTM tracking against the platform-side changes that break attribution. Same operator, same billing surface, same refusal to report something we did not actually observe.

Why we built PriceProof

PriceProof is the second product in a compliance-monitoring line Digital Empire Holdings LLC is shipping in the second half of 2026. The first, PixelProof, monitors Shopify tracking-tag health against the platform-side changes that silently break attribution. PriceProof extends the same recurring-monitoring pattern to reference pricing, where merchant risk has visibly increased in 2026 and where no direct incumbent exists at a price mid-market Shopify sellers can actually adopt.

A previous product in this line was sold on recurring monitoring that had not been built, and we shut its paid tiers off rather than keep taking the money. That is why this page reads the way it does. Every capability described above corresponds to code that runs on a schedule, and every limit described above exists because the code genuinely cannot do the thing. If you find a sentence on this page that outruns the implementation, tell us and we will cut it.

Primary sources

• FTC Act §5 (15 U.S.C. §45), Cornell Legal Information Institute (1938+)
• 16 CFR Part 233, Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (eCFR) (1964)
• FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (FTC.gov) (1964)
• California Attorney General, Consumer Protection reference (evergreen)
• FTC, Advertising and Marketing business guidance (evergreen)

Frequently asked

• Can I buy PriceProof today?

  Yes. PriceProof Monitor is $49/mo, month to month, and you can cancel any time from /account. After checkout you name the storefront you want watched and declare which jurisdictions you sell into, and the daily scan starts the next morning.

• What does PriceProof actually do, in mechanical terms?

  Once a day we fetch the product pages on the storefront you enrolled, read the displayed selling price and the compare-at price on each one, and append them to a history. We then evaluate deterministic rules against that accumulated history: a compare-at price the selling price never reached while we watched, a selling price and compare-at price that have both been unchanged for the whole window, or a compare-at price at or below the selling price. Matches are recorded as observations with the exact window they were observed over.

• What can PriceProof never tell me?

  Three things, permanently. It cannot tell you what your prices were before you enrolled -- the observation window starts the day you sign up and there is no way to backfill it. It cannot tell you what anyone was actually charged, because we read displayed prices on public pages and never see transactions or orders. And it cannot tell you whether anything is lawful: findings are observations about what was displayed, not legal conclusions, and PriceProof is not legal advice.

• Why do I not get any findings in the first two weeks?

  Because a genuine two-week sale and a permanently fake anchor price look exactly the same in fourteen days of data. We hold every finding until its observation window reaches 14 days before it is emailed. The findings are still recorded from day one -- they are held back, not discarded -- and they are released as soon as the window is wide enough to distinguish the two cases. Telling you something at day three would be guessing, and a guess with a statute cited next to it is worse than silence.

• What is a "fake discount" under FTC law?

  The FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233) treat a strikethrough or "was/now" price as deceptive when the "was" reference price is not a bona fide, substantial-volume prevailing price the seller actually offered for a reasonable prior period. State laws go further: California Business & Professions Code §17501 reasons over the three months immediately preceding the sale, and the EU Omnibus amendment to Directive 98/6/EC (Art. 6a) requires an announced reduction to show the lowest price applied in the previous 30 days. PriceProof links the guidance relevant to the jurisdictions you declare; citing a rule is not a statement that you broke it.

• Why does a monitoring tool have to run for months to be worth anything?

  Because the question a reference price raises is historical: what was this item actually offered at over the prior 30 to 90 days? That evidence has to be captured on a daily schedule and timestamped; it cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Every week the tool is not running on your catalog is a week of history you cannot go back and produce. That is also why the honest version of this product says its own window out loud on every line, rather than presenting a day-three observation as if it carried the weight of a day-ninety one.

• How is this different from Shopify's built-in "compare at price" field?

  Shopify's compare-at price is a UI feature: it renders the strikethrough visual and does no validation at all. PriceProof reads the same displayed value and compares it against the price history we have gathered since you enrolled, then tells you what that history does and does not support. Shopify does not claim to enforce reference-pricing law on merchants' behalf, and neither do we -- the difference is that we keep the record.

• Do you guarantee you will catch everything?

  No. We read the products we can discover on your public storefront, once a day, and we can only see what was displayed at the moment we looked. A price that changes between two daily observations is invisible to us, a page we cannot fetch is not observed at all, and a password-protected store cannot be monitored. Anyone promising complete coverage of a catalog from outside it is describing something they cannot do.

The window only grows forward

There is no version of this where you catch up later. Whatever your store displayed last month is gone as far as we are concerned, permanently, and the same will be true of this month in thirty days. The only thing enrolling does is start the clock.