For Australian retailers and subscription businesses, the way you display prices and manage cancellations is about to become a legal requirement, not a design preference. The new unfair trading practices regime turns these elements into build standards with a deadline. If your checkout is still adding fees late in the process, or if cancelling a subscription takes more steps than signing up, you have a problem to solve. The compliance window is effectively a build window, and the fix lives in your checkout and account screens. This is a practical project that requires a technical solution, not just a policy update. Retrofitting a live system later will cost significantly more than designing it correctly now.
This post will guide you through the regulatory changes, detailing what is settled and what is still in motion. We will examine why compliance now lives in the checkout, how to find and remove drip pricing fees, and why the account screen is the test for hard-to-cancel subscriptions. We will then outline a sensible order of work before the 1 July 2027 commencement date and explain why designing it in now is more cost-effective than retrofitting later. You will learn how to treat this period as a strategic build project.
What Australia’s Unfair Trading Practices Regime Changes, and When
Treasury consulted on the unfair trading practices exposure draft from 9 to 23 February 2026, and the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026 has been introduced into Parliament, confirm the current passage status before acting. The date that matters most is 1 July 2027, when the regime is set to commence, with separate law firm commentary describing it as arriving mid-2027.
Drip pricing, in plain terms, means charges and fees that only appear late in the buying journey, after the customer has already decided to buy. Treasury’s draft aims to improve protections against hidden fees by requiring businesses to disclose mandatory transaction fees.
That reaches online stores directly. The deadline is not a legal filing. It is a build date. Anything that has to appear in a checkout or an account screen has to be designed, built and tested before it starts. Keep 1 July 2027 in view as the date the interface has to be ready.
Where the Rules Are Settled and Where They Are Still Moving
Before we go further into design, a clear line on what is and is not settled. The Bill’s detailed rules could not be verified in preparing this article. Check the Bill text and obtain legal advice before acting on any specific obligation.
The sources support these points only. Commencement is proposed for 1 July 2027. Treasury’s draft requires disclosure of mandatory transaction fees, charges a customer cannot opt out of. That is the only carve-out identified in the material reviewed.
Subscription cancellation is the biggest gap. No source reviewed sets out how cancellation must work, so treat any specific cancellation requirement as unconfirmed and label our recommendations accordingly.
Mallesons claims UTP-style enforcement has already landed. The substance behind that claim is not clear, so do not plan around it.
Position as at publication: the Bill may move. Confirm the final text before committing budget.
Why Compliance Now Lives in the Checkout, Not the Policy Page
Once you accept that the detail is unsettled but the direction is not, the practical question changes. Price display and cancellation are not things you explain to a customer. They are things a customer sees and does on a screen.
Terms and conditions do not carry that load. Neither do FAQ entries or a footer disclaimer. Someone deciding whether to buy is reading a checkout step, not a policy page they will never open.
That reframes the work. Price display is a template question: what the cart component renders, in what order, with which total, at which step. Cancellation is a flow question: how many screens sit between login and exit, where the control lives, and whether leaving requires a phone call, an email or a printed form.
Many ecommerce web design decisions were made to convert, not to disclose. A fee held back until the payment screen, a cancel path tucked behind support, both were once defensible conversion choices. Those trade-offs are precisely what this regime puts under pressure, and the fix belongs with whoever owns the build. Platform choice sets the ceiling on how quickly you can act, which is why we treat ecommerce platform selection as a compliance question, not just a technical one.
Drip Pricing: Finding the Fees That Appear Late in Checkout
Compliance is judged on screens, so start with the screen where the price moves. Late fees cluster in predictable places: shipping calculated only at the final step, booking or service fees added on the payment screen, and mandatory handling or platform charges revealed after the customer has committed to a cart. Treasury’s exposure draft describes the laws as requiring disclosure of mandatory transaction fees.
Step one is a fee audit. List every charge that appears after the product price is first shown, then tag each as unavoidable, optional or avoidable. Those tags drive the fix order.
Slant’s reading of where the rules are heading, not a quoted requirement, is the full price the customer will actually pay, shown from the first price screen and held stable through to payment. That forces a careful distinction. An extra a customer actively chooses differs from a fee that applies regardless of their choice. Treat this as an interpretation to test against the Bill, not a settled exemption.
Fee logic often lives in cart configuration, payment gateway settings, shipping rules and platform plugins, so the audit must reach integrations, not just the storefront template. The payoff is compliance plus conversion: fewer abandoned carts from surprise totals is a gain that survives any wording change. The account screen is the next test.
Hard-to-Cancel Subscriptions: The Account Screen Is the Test
The same logic applies to subscriptions, where the test moves from checkout to the account screen. The pattern the regime is aimed at is familiar: one or two clicks to sign up, then an exit that runs through a support inbox, a phone line open during business hours, or a form the customer has to hunt for.
The standard Slant works to is our interpretation, not quoted text: cancelling should take no more effort than signing up. It points in the direction the regime is moving, given the proposed emphasis on clear cancellation pathways, so treat it as a design target rather than a compliance claim.
To find your gap, audit it as a customer. Log in, count the screens between the dashboard and a completed cancellation, and note every step that needs another person or another channel.
Three fixes are worth building: a visible Manage Subscription entry point from the account area, a self-serve cancellation that completes in the flow it starts in, and written confirmation of the end date and any final charge.
Keep retention offers if you value them, but pause, downgrade and reminder options must sit alongside cancellation, never become the only path or a maze around the exit. This is account-area design and subscription state logic, and most checkouts were never scoped to handle either.
Treating the Compliance Window as a Build Window
That account-screen work is a build task with a calendar, just like price display. Treat the period to 1 July 2027 as capacity, not notice. Design and development roadmaps fill quickly, and compliance work left late competes with every other release for the same sprint time.
Start with changes that hold up whatever the final wording says. Showing the price the customer will actually pay from the first screen, and making cancellation simpler, both improve the experience even if a clause shifts. Expect practical returns too: fewer support tickets from customers who cannot find the cancel button, fewer chargebacks and disputes, and cleaner order data once fee logic sits in one place.
Record decisions and dates as you go. That history shows a considered, customer-first process, which is worth having regardless of how the Bill reads.
Do not treat this as a one-off project. Consumer protection expectations keep moving, so price display and cancellation belong in ongoing support and maintenance, not a folder that closes in 2027.
A Sensible Order of Work Before 1 July 2027
With the roadmap case made, sequence the work in three blocks.
Weeks 1 to 4: complete the fee audit and cancellation walkthrough (as described above), screenshotting each step for approvers.
Weeks 4 to 8: fix the highest-risk items first. In most builds that means checkout fee sequencing and the account exit path, both customer-facing and easy to evidence.
Weeks 8 to 12: test real tasks. Can a customer reach a total without a second scroll, and cancel without contacting anyone?
Then brief the build: confirm platform constraints, agree the components, and slot it into the roadmap before 2027 closes. Use our website design pricing guide to budget, and settle ongoing ownership early, much as an NFP website governance plan sets out.
Why Retrofitting a Live Checkout Costs More Than Designing It In
Scheduling the work is the easy part. Paying for it twice is not. In our experience, retrofitting compliance into a checkout that is already live costs more than designing it in from the start. We will not put a figure on that, and would be wary of anyone who does. The claim is comparative, and it holds across the projects we have run.
The reason is structural. Fee logic rarely sits in one template. It is spread across cart configuration, payment integration, tax rules and shipping settings, so changing what price appears when ripples through integrations and order data. A live checkout also carries revenue, so every change needs regression testing, staged release and a rollback plan. That overhead is real work and real calendar time.
Design it in, and the same requirements become settings and variants inside the initial information architecture and component library, shaped during UX research rather than bolted on afterwards.
If a rebuild is already on your roadmap, and you are weighing custom build against off-the-shelf, fold these requirements into that scope now instead of running a second project in 2027 at short notice.
Choosing an Ecommerce Web Design and Development Partner in Melbourne
If retrofitting a live checkout is the expensive path, the cheaper one is choosing a partner who builds it right first time. Look for a team that has run a fee audit, understands how your platform handles checkout and subscription state, and can design account screens as well as storefront pages.
Ask for evidence in the right places. Review ecommerce development website projects that included renewals, account areas and payment flows, not only category pages and campaign landing pages. Ask how work passes between UX research, design and development: a price display fix that stops at a design file is not a fix, and a checkout change without user testing is a guess. Ask who owns ongoing support and maintenance, because display and cancellation expectations will keep shifting after launch.
When evaluating proposals, judge on specificity, how the team addresses checkout steps, account flows and platform constraints, not portfolio polish. Slant Digital is a Melbourne based digital agency covering brand strategy and identity, UX research and design, website design and development, ecommerce solutions, custom web development, hosting, and ongoing support and maintenance. For build-partner selection, see our guide to Custom Web Development Melbourne: Strategic Partners vs Build Shops, and for design context, Web Design Melbourne.
What to Do Next
Whoever you choose, start by running the fee audit and cancellation walkthrough, both cost only time and size the problem before any budget is requested. Decide early whether compliance work rides a planned rebuild or stands alone, and put 1 July 2027 in the roadmap with a named owner. Keep checking the Bill as it finalises; this is a position held at publication, not a settled compliance opinion. For not-for-profits, our NFP website brief checklist helps shape the brief before work begins.
Conclusion
The message is clear: compliance now lives in your checkout, not on a policy page. Show the full price from the first screen, make cancelling no harder than signing up, and treat 1 July 2027 as a build deadline rather than a distant legal detail. When you need a build partner, choose one that can show how it handles checkout steps, account flows and platform constraints. Slant Digital, a Melbourne based digital agency, offers ecommerce solutions, custom web development, and ongoing support. Use this window as a build window, and start today.
