The British online fashion seller Boohoo has been fined €2.3m (£2m) by France’s consumer watchdog for deceptive practices such as offering fake discounts.
The Manchester-based firm, whose parent company renamed itself Debenhams Group last year, was found to have exaggerated the discounts it was offering, giving shoppers a false impression of the savings they were making, according to the directorate-general for competition, consumer affairs and fraud control.
Of the promotions examined by the watchdog, 40% were found not to be real price reductions, 7% were a lower reduction than advertised, and 48% were a price increase.
Boohoo also used terms such as “leather” or “suede” to sell synthetic products, contravening French rules on product labelling, the regulator said.
The fine comes four years after Boohoo reached a settlement in a $100m (£73m) US lawsuit that alleged the retailer used fake promotions to mislead shoppers.
The settlement of the case, brought in California, was agreed “without admission of liability”, according to Boohoo, whose brands PrettyLittleThing and NastyGal were accused of running sham sales and promotions in the US for at least four to five years.
The French fine comes after a rocky few years for the online seller, which has faced rising competition from cut-price rivals such as Shein, Temu and the secondhand site Vinted as well increased delivery costs and tariffs in the US.
The group has been battling to revive sales after a boom during the Covid pandemic, when high street shops were closed. With profits under pressure from inflation on wages and new regulatory demands, such as packaging and European textile waste rules, more established UK online sellers are struggling to invest sufficiently to keep up with Shein’s digital innovation.
Boohoo’s brand was also tarnished in 2020 after reports of poor working practices in Leicester factories used by the company were found to be “substantially true” in a damning independent report.
Debenhams Group, which owns brands including Oasis, Warehouse and Karen Millen as well as its namesake brand and Boohoo, in February raised £35m from shareholders to cut debt and has faced criticisms of its strategy from its biggest shareholder, the Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, which now owns more than a quarter of the company.
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A spokesperson for Boohoo said the problems related to a period from October 2023 to February 2024, when the business was under its previous management, and were now resolved.
“We have cooperated fully with the regulator, and continue to review how we price and label our products,” the spokesperson said.
Debenhams Group has been contacted for comment.
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