Offer copy vs published pricing-guide factors for growth teams
Methodology: pricing patterns · deterministic math · human review
Paste your promotional offer copy before you publish it. Get a scored pre-check report — former-price wording, discount arithmetic checked against your own numbers, "free" offer conditions, urgency and scarcity claims, and market-context advisories — based on the deceptive-pricing guides the FTC publishes (16 CFR Part 233) and the price-marketing themes other regimes document. A heads-up, not a legal opinion.
1. What the engine owns
Severity-ranked findings from pasted offer copy against word lists, patterns and arithmetic derived from the FTC Guide Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233 — former prices, comparisons and fictitious discounts, “free” offers) and the deception standard at 16 CFR Part 251. Five check families: reference-price vocabulary (“was”, “regularly”, “compare at”, “list price”); percent-math, which parses the money tokens in your copy — US thousands-comma and EU decimal-comma formats both — pairs the reference and sale price, recomputes the real discount, and flags claims that overstate it beyond a ±2-point rounding tolerance; free-conditions, which looks for “free” claims whose purchase conditions or cost disclosures are missing; scarcity-urgency, which ranks stock and deadline assertions by how categorical they are phrased; and terms-context advisories that escalate claim sensitivity by offer type and market. Scores dock 20/6/2 per HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW finding (advisories never dock); the rule snapshot is dated by the engine version — it is not synced with regulator or platform pages in real time. When a price pair cannot be parsed, the arithmetic check is skipped and the report says so — nothing is guessed. Demo is labelled Rule-based — never silent mock.
2. What optional AI may do
Explain or polish findings when a key is configured. Upstream failure returns 502. No invented findings, no quotes from copy you did not paste, no price pair the parser did not actually find.
3. What you must do
- Review findings against your own price history and inventory records — only you can substantiate a “was” number or an “only 3 left” count.
- Apply fixes in your own tooling — OfferPrecheck does not connect to stores, marketplaces or ad accounts and never publishes anything.
- Treat output as decision-support, not a pricing-law certification or legal advice.
4. What we deliberately do not do
- Historical-price verification — whether your reference price was openly offered for a reasonable period is a records question outside the pasted text; it appears only as a labelled advisory, never as a lookup result.
- Store, marketplace or ad-account connections, price scraping, competitor monitoring, or continuous auditing.
- Compliance probabilities or enforcement-prediction numbers — outside the reviewer nobody can compute what it will decide, and pretending otherwise is the check becoming the pattern it flags.
- Legal review — the Part 233 checks read claim patterns and arithmetic, not your full obligations; EU, UK and Australian consumer-law positions are reported as context advisories only (their primary texts were unreachable from the build environment that produced this rule set — the exclusion is documented in the rule-sources log), and regulated campaigns need a qualified professional.
Heuristic pre-check — not a pricing-law certification or legal advice. No historical-price verification, store or ad-account connection, or platform-policy measurement performed.