The Ruling
On 14 May 2026, the Federal Court of Australia ruled that Coles supermarkets had misled shoppers through its Down Down discount campaign. Justice Michael O'Bryan found that 13 of 14 sample promotions were not genuine discounts — Coles had temporarily raised prices on products before reducing them and advertising the reduction as a special.
The judge set a clear benchmark: if the higher price was not in place for at least 12 weeks, the subsequent discount was not genuine. Several products had been at higher prices for just four weeks before being marked down.
The ACCC brought the case because these pricing practices made it harder for customers to identify genuine value while shopping for essentials. Coles now faces potential penalties in the hundreds of millions. A similar case against Woolworths is still before the courts.
The Pattern
The Coles ruling exposes a pricing tactic that extends well beyond grocery. The core mechanism is simple: establish an artificially high reference price, then present the real price as a discount. The consumer feels like they are getting a deal. The retailer captures margin on both ends.
This pattern shows up across Australian retail — and gaming trade-ins are one of the clearest examples.
How Game Trade-Ins Work at EB Games
Walk into an EB Games store with a copy of a recent release — say a game that retails for $99 new and sells preowned for $68. EB Games will typically offer you between $8 and $25 in trade credit. That is not a discount. It is not even a transaction where both parties share value. It is a transfer of value from the consumer to the retailer.
EB's Best Trade Price Guarantee — launched in May 2024 — sounds like it protects consumers. But the fine print explicitly excludes online and peer-to-peer traders from the comparison set. They are only guaranteeing to match other physical retailers who use the same suppressed trade-in model.
Why We Exclude EB Trade-In Data
When we built the Greatest GOAT pricing engine, we made a deliberate architectural decision: EB Games trade-in values are excluded from our Fair Market Value calculations.
Our engine pulls from 22+ independent data sources — eBay Australia, PriceCharting, Gametraders Shopify stores, CEX, international marketplaces — each weighted by reliability, recency, and market relevance. We track over 100,000 price snapshots across these sources.
EB Games trade-in values are in our database. We display them. Users can see exactly what EB would offer. But we flag them as comparison-only data — they do not influence the Fair Market Value we calculate.
Why? For the same reason the Federal Court just ruled against Coles. Blending suppressed trade-in values into a market average pulls the entire valuation down. Our testing showed that including EB trade-in data in FMV calculations suppressed game valuations by 6 to 37 percent depending on the title. That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between a fair trade and a rip-off.
What This Means for Gamers
The Coles ruling sets a precedent: Australian consumers have a right to transparent, genuine pricing. Reference prices that do not reflect real market conditions are misleading.
At Greatest GOAT, every game valuation is derived from real market data. No artificial inflation. No suppressed trade-in values masquerading as fair offers. When you trade on our platform, both traders receive value — that is the fundamental difference between peer-to-peer recommerce and the retail trade-in model.
One trade. Two winners. Zero rip-offs.
The Numbers
| EB Games Trade-In | EB Games Preowned | Greatest GOAT FMV | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical recent title | $8–$25 (est.) | $48–$68 | $35–$50 |
| EB's margin | 170%–750% | ||
| Your savings on GG vs EB | 2.5–3× more value |
The Australian second-hand economy is worth $60 billion. The recommerce sector is growing 2.5 times faster than traditional retail. Consumers are voting with their wallets — and they are choosing transparency.
What Happens Next
The Coles penalty hearing is pending. The Woolworths case is still before the courts. And Australian consumers are paying more attention to pricing practices than they have in a generation.
We think that is a good thing.
Greatest GOAT was built on six founding principles — and the first one is transparency. Today's ruling did not change our approach. It validated it.
© 2026 Greatest GOAT. All rights reserved. Greatest GOAT is Australia's peer-to-peer physical video game trading platform.
Disclaimer: Retail trade-in estimates referenced in this article are based on publicly available community data (OzBargain 2018–2024). EB Games does not publish official trade-in rates. EB Games Best Trade Price Guarantee (BTPG) excludes online and private traders (Source: EB Games BTPG T&Cs, May 2024). Greatest GOAT is not affiliated with EB Games, JB Hi-Fi, Coles, Woolworths, or any other retailer. All third-party names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All figures are estimates only.