Audit UK sites for DMCCA fake-review and drip-pricing breaches
Find the breaches, get the policy, for £39 a month
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A self-serve tool that crawls a UK business's website, flags banned practices under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (unmarked incentivised reviews, suppressed negative reviews, misleading star-rating aggregation, and drip pricing where mandatory fees appear late at checkout), then auto-generates the written review-management policy the law now requires every trader to hold. It is built for the long tail of UK ecommerce and hospitality SMEs who cannot afford a £15k+ compliance consultancy but now sit under the same enforcement regime as the brands the CMA is already investigating. The timing is the whole story: the regime went live on 6 April 2025, the CMA found over half of 100+ businesses it reviewed could be failing to comply, and on 27 March 2026 it opened five named investigations.
The Story
Meet the user
Kelly runs a small homeware shop online from a converted garage in Reading. She sells maybe sixty orders a week, ships them herself, and for years she has nudged happy customers with a friendly "leave us a review and we'll pop a 10% code in your inbox." It felt like good manners. Then a supplier WhatsApp group lights up one evening with a screenshot of a news story: the CMA has opened investigations into Just Eat, Autotrader and three others over fake and misleading reviews, with fines of up to 10% of turnover. Someone in the group says, almost casually, "you all know you're supposed to have a written review policy now, right? And your incentivised reviews have to be marked as incentivised." Kelly does not have a written review policy. She has never marked a single review as incentivised. And she has a £4.99 "packaging and handling" fee that only shows up on the final checkout screen, which a comment further down the thread says is exactly the drip pricing the regulator just fined the AA £4.2 million for.
She spends the next evening going site to site, page to page, trying to work out what counts and what does not, drowning in law-firm blog posts written for in-house counsel at large retailers, none of it telling her what SHE specifically needs to fix. The quotes she gets back from two compliance consultancies are £12k and "from £900 a month." Then a peer in the same group drops a link: a tool where you paste your URL, it crawls the whole site overnight, hands you a plain-English list of exactly which reviews, fees and rating widgets breach the Act, and generates the written review-management policy ready to publish. Kelly runs the scan over a cup of tea. Eleven flags, one downloadable policy, and a checklist she can actually work through. For the first time since the WhatsApp message, she stops feeling sick about it.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.2/10
Large addressable base (over half of UK SMEs sell online) with clear whitespace, but scored conservatively without quantitative search-volume data this session
Existential legal risk (fines to 10% of global turnover), the CMA found over half of 100+ reviewed businesses possibly non-compliant, and five named investigations are now live
Standard web stack plus a crawler and an LLM for policy drafting; reliable drip-pricing detection across arbitrary checkouts is the one moderately hard part
Law live since April 2025, grace period over, five investigations opened 27 March 2026, regulator actively reviewing sites. A clear before/after moment
The written-policy and ongoing-monitoring obligations are permanent, but the acute panic-buy demand peaks within 1–2 years and incumbents may bundle this in
Low barrier overall (solo-buildable, under £1,000), with checkout-simulation logic the main thing lifting it above trivial
Strongest
Timing
The Act, the CMA's over-half-non-compliant finding, and five named investigations in March 2026 create a textbook regulatory catalyst that did not exist two years ago.
Watch out
Durability
Once the initial scramble settles and the policy is published once, the recurring reason to keep paying must be real (ongoing review monitoring, new-SKU fee checks, regulation updates), or this becomes a one-off purchase.
Pain Point
The problem
“The CMA found that more than half of the 100+ businesses it reviewed could be failing to comply with the fake-reviews guidance, and that many were relying on a vague 'user content must comply with all applicable laws' line that the CMA says is unlikely to meet the requirement.”
— Paraphrased from CMA enforcement coverage, 2025–2026
The pain here is not a vague nice-to-have. It is a freshly enforceable legal obligation with eye-watering penalties attached, landing on a population of businesses that mostly do not know it applies to them. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made fake reviews and drip pricing banned practices from 6 April 2025. Crucially for this idea, the Act imposes a positive obligation: traders who publish reviews must hold a clear written policy prohibiting fake reviews and setting out their approach to incentivised reviews, must assess the risk of banned reviews appearing, and must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove them. Separately, all mandatory fees must be in the headline price, not dripped in at checkout.
Three things make the pain acute and timely. First, the penalties are existential: fines can reach the greater of £300,000 or 10% of global annual turnover, and the CMA's first drip-pricing action fined the AA £4.2 million and ordered refunds of over £760,000 to more than 80,000 customers. Second, the regulator is visibly active: the grace period ended in 2025, the CMA wrote to 54 companies over potential non-compliance, and on 27 March 2026 it opened five named investigations (Autotrader, Feefo, Dignity, Just Eat and Pasta Evangelists), spanning cars, funerals and food delivery, signalling no sector is safe. Third, SMEs are flying blind: the available guidance is written for in-house legal teams at large retailers, and the consultancy quotes to find out start in the thousands.
That gap between the law now applies to me and nobody has told me what I specifically need to fix is the wedge.
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