My Own Book Page Is Running a Sale on Nothing

Go look at my book page right now. It is at realryannichols.com/book.

Up top there is a little price bar. It says launch price. Then it shows you 29.99 dollars. Then, right beside it, it shows you 29.99 dollars again.

One of those two is supposed to have a line through it. That is the entire design of that little component. An old price struck out, the new price next to it, your eye does the math and feels good about the difference.

Today both slots are holding the same number.

So my own store page is advertising a sale where the discount is zero.

I published a piece on September 7 that quoted the launch price at 17.76 dollars against a 29.99 dollar list price. That one is still up here. I am not going to tell you why the number changed or what is supposed to be sitting there now, because I have not dug into it yet and I am not going to guess in public about my own store.

What I can tell you is what the page shows today. What it shows today is a strike-through with nothing struck.

This is the second one in two days

Yesterday I was reading a pricing card on another site I work on and it did the exact same thing. A regular price label sitting directly above an identical current price.

Different site. Different business. Same shape of mistake.

That is not two people being careless. That is a component doing precisely what it was told.

Somebody built a price block that takes two inputs, a was and a now, and renders both of them. It has no opinion about whether those two numbers are actually different. Hand it the same number twice and it will cheerfully draw you a sale sign.

It does not know that a sale sign with no sale on it is a small lie.

The fix is four lines of thinking

When you build the price block, give it a rule.

If the old price is missing, or if the old price is less than or equal to the current price, do not render the old price at all. Do not draw the strike. Do not draw the percent-off badge. Just show the price.

The component hides the sale furniture when there is no sale.

Do that once and it is done forever. Every page that uses that block becomes incapable of lying to a customer about a discount. Including on the days when you are busy, or tired, or you changed a price at eleven at night and could not remember which field feeds which slot.

This is the actual difference between a website and a system

A website is a set of pages where you are personally responsible for every number being right every single day.

A system is a set of rules where being right is the default and being wrong takes effort.

On a website, correctness is a chore you have to keep doing. In a system, correctness is the floor you stand on.

And you only get the second one if you own the thing.

If your storefront lives inside somebody else's platform, that price block is theirs, not yours. You cannot add the rule. You can only remember to be careful, forever, on every product, and hope that whoever else touches the account remembers too.

Your accuracy becomes a habit instead of a guarantee.

That is renting. That is the whole argument I make to people about owning your platform, and it is never really about the logo or the colors. It is about whether you are allowed to install your own guardrails.

I own mine, which is why I can write this rule into it this week. It is also why the mistake is entirely mine, and why you are reading about it here instead of never hearing about it at all.

Go check yours today

Not the prices on your main sales page. You know those by heart.

Check the ones on the pages you forgot about. The old landing page. The footer. The checkout. The email template nobody has opened in a year. The social bio. The flyer you uploaded as a PDF in the spring.

Somewhere there is a number you already changed, still sitting exactly where you left it.

Find them. Fix them.

Then build the rule, so the next one cannot happen while you are not looking.

That second part is the part that actually saves you.