Walk into any supplement shop — physical or digital — and every price seems to tell a story. A bottle 'was £69.99' but is 'now £24.99'. Another promises '60 servings' that last a month only at half the recommended dose. A third looks expensive until you work out the price per capsule. None of this is accidental: it is pricing psychology, and the most common trick is the anchor — a reference price planted in your mind so the real price feels like a bargain.
The inflated 'compare at' price
Anchoring works like this: the first number you see becomes your reference point, and everything after it is judged against it. Supplement sellers know this, so many listings show a 'compare at', 'RRP' or 'list price' that no one has ever paid. A vitamin D bottle 'compares at' £39.99 and sells for £14.99, and your brain registers a £25 saving instead of asking whether £14.99 was ever fair.
Some markets have rules about reference pricing, but enforcement online is patchy and cross-border sellers often play by their own norms. Treat every 'compare at' figure as marketing copy, not information. The honest question is never 'how much am I saving?' — it is 'what is this worth at this dose?'
The permanent sale
A close cousin of the inflated anchor is the sale that never ends. Some brands run '70% off' or 'flash sale' banners all year. If a product has been discounted every day you have ever checked, the discounted price is the real price and the strikethrough figure is fiction.
Protect yourself by ignoring the strikethrough entirely. Cover it with your thumb — literally or mentally — and evaluate the selling price on its own merits. Where a marketplace shows price history, check it. A genuine bargain is a price lower than what the product usually sells for, not lower than a number the seller invented this morning.
Price per serving, not per bottle
The single most useful habit is to compare unit prices: the cost per serving, per capsule, or per 100 mg of the active ingredient. Bottle prices are meaningless on their own because serving sizes and capsule counts vary wildly.
Two magnesium bottles illustrate the point. Bottle A costs £19.99 for 120 capsules; bottle B costs £14.99 for 60. Bottle B looks cheaper until you divide: roughly 17p per capsule against 25p. Yet even that is not the full picture, because you also need the dose per capsule. If A's capsules contain 200 mg each and B's contain 400 mg, the cost per 100 mg may tell a different story. Build the habit of doing this quick arithmetic, or follow a practical price-comparison guide that walks through the maths step by step.
Comparing identical-dose equivalents
Supplements differ in strength, form and fillers, so a fair comparison means matching like with like. Decide the daily dose you want — say, 1,000 IU of vitamin D3 or 500 mg of a particular extract — then work out how many days each product lasts at that dose. Divide the bottle price by the number of days, not the number of capsules.
Watch for serving-size games. A label may define a 'serving' as one capsule while the directions suggest two a day, quietly halving the bottle's real lifespan. Another may boast '120 servings' of a proprietary blend without disclosing how much of each ingredient you get. When the label hides the dose, you cannot compare value — and that is usually the point. Independent write-ups can help: this review of a propolis-based formula breaks down what is inside the bottle so you can judge the price against the contents.
Your five-second checklist
Before you add anything to your basket, run through these:
- Ignore the strikethrough. Judge the selling price alone.
- Work out the price per serving at the dose you will actually take.
- Compare identical daily doses across brands, not bottle sizes.
- Be suspicious of permanent sales and 'compare at' prices you cannot verify.
- Read the label for serving-size tricks — two-a-day directions on a one-capsule serving halve the value.
Anchors work because they are effortless: they hand your brain a shortcut. The defence is equally simple — a few seconds of arithmetic. Once you compare unit prices and dose equivalents, the 'bargains' reveal themselves, and the genuinely good-value products, often the plainly labelled ones with no sale banner, become easy to spot. For more independent, no-nonsense supplement analysis, The Supplement Rating is a useful place to continue your research.
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