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Comment by rkachowski | Hacker News Reader

An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site.

I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales

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Recently I wanted to purchase something from prime now, I added the product and during checkout where I put in the OTP ( 2FA is mandatory in India ), I changed my mind about purchasing and quit the app, knowing the purchase would fail. Amazon then quietly changed the order from prepaid to cash on delivery without asking me and went through with the order.

I thought that was a shady way of closing a sale.

> 2FA is mandatory in India

Well you did just show that it's not :)

mandatory for card transactions.

Unless you were joking, in which case, whoosh me.

I must have misunderstood your comment. I was under the impression that 2FA was mandatory for all purchases, not just card transactions.

So I thought you had figured out a way around that.

How...is that even allowed???

> changed the order from prepaid to cash on delivery without asking me and went through with the order

Hah, joke's on them. When the item arrived I'd honestly say, "I didn't order that," and shut the door without paying.

I’ve also noticed that they don’t let me ship a lot of products (mostly food, but also random harmless electronics) to shipping points or Amazon boxes in my city (in Spain), telling me they are full (they are not, they let me ship other products there and it tells me it’s full with literally any shipping point or Amazon box). They only let me ship it to a home address.

I can’t prove it’s not a bug, but it seems such a blaring issue that it’s impossible that they haven’t been noticed, specially since some people can’t ever ship to a home address.

What benefit would they get from this though?

Potentially they are worried about food going bad while left in a drop-off box. I don't think that is very sinister, but they could have a better UI for it.

Understandable why they won't ship food to Amazon boxes. No idea about electronics though, and they should have a better error message than just "it's full".

I don't like to defend Amazon because they are getting shadier all the time, but I always ship to a Correos office near my flat from amazon.es and haven't had this problem (yet?). Maybe it isn't the same thing as the box though. I've seen random 3rd party items that can't be left at Correos, but they do tell you at the start of the process.

Is your Correos box a regular PO BOX? I tried getting shipped things to a Correos P.O. Box with Amazon and they often sent by SEUR or similar and they were unable to ship it to a Correos PO Box and requested manual pickup.

I agree with other commenters that this behavior is not very dark and probably mostly bad UX, but it stuck me as they maybe not telling me that due to regulatory/shipping/safety issues it was better or more economic to ship directly to home.

this is the classic pattern that has been used by ecommerce sites for over a decade now. Once the checkout process starts, the number of links that may distract your checkout process drops dramatically.

I've found this to no longer be true.

Now a dropdown pops out and asks if you're sure you wanna leave checkout, you can choose "back to cart" and "continue checkout".

This is for US desktop. could be different for other devices/locations.

> I've found this to no longer be true.

Still true over here (outside US).

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