You have seen the layout. Three bottles, and beneath them a stack of book covers with a line through a price: Bonus #1 — value $97. Bonus #2 — value $79. Total value $297. Yours free today.
The guides may well be useful. The numbers are not.
Where those valuations come from
Nowhere. That is the short version. A digital guide that has never been sold at $97 does not have a value of $97; it has a value of whatever someone would pay, which for a PDF bundled with a supplement is generally nothing. The figure is chosen because it makes the arithmetic on the page look better.
This is not usually fraud, and it is rarely illegal. It is a convention the category inherited from direct-response marketing decades ago and never questioned. But conventions can still be worth noticing, because the tell is useful.
Why the tell matters
A seller willing to print a fictional number in the one place where the arithmetic is easiest for you to check is telling you something about how they treat numbers elsewhere — in the crossed-out "regular price", in the savings figure, in the countdown timer that resets when you reload.
What a padded offer looks like next to a straight one
Same product, same price — two ways of presenting the value
Three checks that take two minutes
- Is the crossed-out price real? Search the product name and the figure. If nothing has ever sold at that price, the "saving" is invented. A saving measured against a genuine alternative price — a smaller pack, say — is honest arithmetic.
- Does the timer reset? Reload the page. If the countdown starts again, it was never counting down to anything.
- Are the bonuses described or valued? "Six guides, included with 3 and 6-bottle orders" is a description. "Six guides worth $297" is a decoration. The first tells you what you get.
None of this means the product is bad
Worth saying clearly: padded presentation and a poor product are different failures, and plenty of decent supplements are sold with theatrical offer pages because that is what the category does. Judge the formula on the label and the offer on the arithmetic, separately.
For what it is worth, we list the six SodaFit guides on the main page without a dollar figure attached, and the savings on the pricing table are measured against the 2-bottle per-bottle price rather than an invented list price. Both are deliberate, and both are checkable — which is the only reason to mention them.
