Civil suit charges Overstock with misrepresenting prices

A civil lawsuit filed in Superior Court of California in Alameda County yesterday charges Overstock.com Inc. with making “untrue and misleading” claims about its prices. The suit, which was filed by seven Northern California district attorneys, alleges that Overstock’s comparison prices, which the web retailer uses as a basis for setting discounts, are consistently inaccurate.

The suit states that since January 1, 2006, “Overstock routinely and systematically made untrue and misleading comparative advertising claims about the prices of its products.” The complaint charges that prices presented under the labels “List Price” and “Compare At (Overstock) Price” were not prevailing market prices and that Overstock “used various misleading measures to inflate the comparative prices, and thus artificially increase the discounts it claimed to be offering customers.”

The suit also charges that Overstock.com’s misleading pricing applied to “virtually every product listing” since January 2006, and seeks at least $15 million in fines and restitution for misleading pricing information published on Overstock.com.

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