Tesco did enough research to keep price comparison legitimate, says regulator

The disclaimer is not necessary even though the chain compared its prices with those on a rival's website, which in one case was more expensive than its shop shelf price.

Tesco published adverts which compared its prices to those of Boots, with small print that made it clear that the Boots prices had been taken from its website.

Featured razor blades were priced at £9.76 in Tesco and £11.24 at Boots, but Boots said that the price of the blades in its shops at the time was £9.60. It complained that Tesco's advert was misleading.

The ASA rejected that claim because it found that Tesco had done enough research to justify the use of Boots' internet prices as the basis of comparison and its assumption that these were generally the lowest prices.

It described how Tesco carried out checks in April 2008 to see if Boots' online and High Street prices differed.

"They conducted an exercise to compare Boots' in-store and online prices," said the ASA ruling. "They bought 219 Boots products in-store and compared the prices online: 212 matched exactly, whereas seven were cheaper online because of internet-only price promotions. On another occasion, Tesco bought 125 Boots products which produced 96 price matches in-store and online, the remainder being cheaper online because of a '20% off' internet exclusive promotion on healthcare products."

The ASA said that Tesco's assumption that internet prices would be the cheapest available was generally correct.

"We … understood why Tesco had thought it was reasonable to compare their prices against Boots' online ones," its ruling said. "Although Boots said their online prices were sometimes more expensive than their in-store ones, they could not give us any indication of how often that occurred. Boots did not confirm whether the difference in the razor blade prices was an error (they believed that was immaterial), and were unable to provide us with any details of how frequently their in-store and online prices differed."

Tesco said that it could put text in all of its ads saying that it believed Boots' shop and internet prices were meant to match, online promotions and errors excepted, but that it thought that was too cumbersome a way to fix a small problem.

The ASA agreed, and found that Tesco had done enough research to form an adequate basis for its price comparisons.

"We considered that, without that information, to require Tesco to explicitly state in the ad that Boots online and in-store prices differed was unnecessary," it said. "We considered that, in the circumstances, the first part of the small print 'Prices checked online at Boots.com on 25/03/09', which appeared in bold, was sufficient, because it was likely to suggest that the prices used in the comparison might not apply in-store. We considered the disclaimer suggested by Tesco was not required. We concluded that the ad was unlikely to mislead."