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Four retailers have been slammed for "misleading" furniture prices - but consumers have been reassured over the five sellers you can trust. A Which? study found Very, Furniture Village, Blinds Direct, and 247 Blinds are using questionable "was/now" sale labels. Which? analysed the prices of more than 40,000 home furnishing products from nine major brands over the course of a whopping 10 months. And it found retailers using inflated "was prices" that hadn't been charged for weeks – or even months – before a sale began. The worst offenders were Very, Furniture Village, 247 Blinds, and Blinds Direct. But it found Argos, Blinds2Go, Dunelm, Ikea, and John Lewis, which has a nearby store in Solihull , were priced better. READ MORE Free bus passes could be extended to one group of under 66s Lisa Webb, consumer law expert at Which?, said: "Sneaky pricing tactics are unacceptable, but Which? investigations have repeatedly found problems with pricing across a range of retailers. "Shoppers should take discounts from these stores with a pinch of salt and make sure they shop around at other retailers to see if they can find anything similar at a better price before parting with any hard-earned cash." The analysts found one product product was labelled ‘Was £349, Now £299’ - but actually, the set hadn’t been sold at £349 since- two months previously. At Furniture Village, on 3 February, the Dolce dining set at Furniture Village was labelled ‘Was £2,349, Now £1,795’, according to Which? However, between 8 January and 2 February, the set was sold at £2,095 – that’s £254 less than the ‘was’ price, the consumer body added. The CMA offers guidance on how online retailers should use sales and price labels to market their products, Which? has said. It says that for a price comparison to be genuine, the ‘was’ price must be that which was offered immediately before the discount begins.
