Australia's new unfair trading practices law will hit your popups and your subject lines
The Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026 passed both Houses of federal parliament on 1 July. It introduces a general prohibition on unfair trading practices into Australian Consumer Law, and it names the exact tactics a lot of e-commerce email and popup strategy is built on.
What the Bill actually prohibits
The law targets conduct that unreasonably distorts or manipulates a consumer's decision-making and causes, or is likely to cause, financial or other detriment. Both conditions have to be met, so ordinary persuasive marketing stays legal. What changes is where the line sits.
The Bill and the guidance around it name specific examples: misleading countdown timers or low-stock claims used to create false urgency, "confirm shaming" copy that guilts a customer into opting in (the decline button reading something like "No thanks, I prefer to pay full price"), and hidden or confusing cancellation paths.
Read that list again as an email marketer. Countdown timers in cart abandonment flows. Stock scarcity lines in promotional subject lines. Popup copy engineered to make declining feel like a bad decision. These aren't fringe tactics. They're default settings in most Klaviyo and Mailchimp popup templates.
Why "unreasonable" is doing the heavy lifting
The Bill doesn't ban urgency or scarcity claims outright. A countdown timer tied to a genuine sale end date is fine. The problem is fabrication: a timer that resets on every page reload, a "only 3 left" badge that shows regardless of actual inventory, a "selling fast" line with no data behind it.
The distinction the law draws is between skilled persuasion and manipulation that relies on a false impression. That's a judgment call, and the Bill's drafters have said as much. For brands, that ambiguity is the risk. You won't get a checklist. You'll get enforcement patterns over time, the same way ACMA's Spam Act enforcement built up case by case.
Subscriptions and the sign-up-to-cancel gap
The Bill also introduces mandatory obligations for subscription contracts: clear upfront disclosure of terms, reminder notices before renewals or price increases, and a cancellation process that's no harder than sign-up.
For brands running SMS or email subscription offers, loyalty programmes, or "subscribe and save" flows, this matters directly. If a customer can join a subscription list through a one-click popup but has to email support and wait five business days to leave it, that asymmetry is exactly what the reform targets.
The compliance dimension already in play
This sits alongside, not instead of, existing Spam Act obligations. ACMA has already fined Lululemon $702,900 and Betfair $871,660 in 2026 for commercial messages without functional unsubscribe links. The Unfair Trading Practices regime adds a second regulator lens on the same customer-facing behaviour: not just "did you include an unsubscribe link" but "was the sign-up experience itself manipulative."
Two different tests, two different regulators, both converging on the same popups and flows.
What brands need to do
You have twelve months before enforcement starts, which is enough time to do this properly rather than in a rush before 1 July 2027.
Start with your popups. Pull up every discount and sign-up popup currently live on your site and read the decline copy the way a regulator would. If declining feels like it's designed to produce guilt or shame rather than simply state a choice, rewrite it as a neutral option.
Audit urgency claims for accuracy. Any countdown timer, stock counter, or "selling fast" line needs to map to something real. If your platform generates these dynamically without a data source behind them, that's the first thing to fix.
Check your subscription cancellation path against your sign-up path. If joining takes one click and leaving takes a support ticket, that gap is now a legal exposure, not just a churn problem.
Review confirm-shaming language across your whole email programme, not just popups. Win-back campaigns, cart abandonment flows, and renewal reminders often carry the same manipulative framing under different packaging.
Practical action steps
Run a one-hour audit of every popup and subscription flow currently live, screenshot each one, and note where urgency, scarcity, or guilt-based copy shows up. Rank findings by how manipulative they'd look to a regulator reading them cold, not by how well they convert. Fix the worst offenders first, and rewrite decline and cancellation copy so both options are stated in plain, neutral language. Build the review into your existing campaign QA process rather than treating it as a one-off, since new popups and flows get built constantly and the twelve-month runway will pass faster than it feels right now.
Not sure how your current setup would hold up? Run the free audit, ten questions on your automations, deliverability, and reporting, with a score and a prioritised list of what to fix first.
Frequently asked
Both. The Bill covers conduct across online and offline settings, and regulators have specifically called out countdown timers, low-stock claims, and confirm-shaming opt-in copy as examples. Those tactics show up as often in email and popups as they do on product pages.
The Bill passed both Houses on 1 July 2026 but doesn't apply until 1 July 2027. That's twelve months to audit and fix your flows, not something to action this quarter and forget.
Yes, if they're accurate. The law targets false or misleading urgency, not urgency itself. A countdown timer tied to a real sale end date is fine. A countdown timer that resets every time someone revisits the page is exactly what this law is built to catch.
The maximum penalty is the greater of $100 million, three times the benefit gained, or 30% of turnover during the breach period, calculated per contravention. Smaller brands are less likely to be first-round enforcement targets, but the law applies regardless of size, and the definitions used to build a case will be tested against everyone eventually.