Price research
Are UK furniture “sale” prices real?
We checked every advertised saving against what that exact product had actually been selling for. Roughly a quarter of them were not savings at all.
23.3% were not.
What we did
Our tracker records what UK home products cost, every day. That means when a retailer advertises a product as reduced, we can check the claim against the product’s own history rather than taking the “was” price on trust.
For January–March 2026 we took every tracked product that was advertising a saving — 150 of them in the categories large enough to measure — and asked one question of each: is the current price actually below what this product has been selling for lately?
What we found, by category
| Category | Products on “sale” | Genuine | Not a saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modern Living Room | 58 | 75.86% | 24.1% |
| Kitchen Accessories | 59 | 79.66% | 20.3% |
| Lighting | 33 | 72.73% | 27.3% |
Categories with fewer than 20 advertised savings are excluded — too few to say anything meaningful about, and including them would pad the study rather than strengthen it.
What this means if you’re shopping
A “was” price is a claim, not a fact, and roughly roughly a quarter of the ones we checked did not survive contact with the product’s own history. The reliable test is not the size of the discount badge — it is whether the price is low relative to what that product normally costs. That is the entire reason we publish price history on every product we track.
Limitations
- This is our catalogue, not the whole UK market. It covers products we track on Amazon.co.uk, which is a large sample but not a census.
- We compare against each product’s quarterly average, not its median. The median would be marginally better; it requires holding every price reading for every product at once. The difference is small at this sample size, but it is a compromise and we would rather state it.
- Only products that advertise a saving are counted. A product quietly reduced without a “was” price is not in this study — it is not making a claim to test.
- Sample sizes are on the table above. Where a category is thin, it is excluded rather than estimated.
- We earn commission when you buy through our links. That is disclosed on every page, and it is worth saying plainly here: we make money either way, which is precisely why we can afford to tell you when a discount isn’t one.
Using this research
Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures with attribution to 7 Interior Design. The full quarterly dataset, including every sample size, is on the UK Furniture & Homeware Price Index. If you need a different cut — a specific category, a longer window, the raw series — ask through the contact form and we will run it.