How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Nice that the editor was at least allowed to point out that their own employer employs many of these "dark patterns".
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
I also track who is selling my name to marketers by using initials. So my subscriber name instead of Bob Jones is Ned Y. Jones for the NYT sub, Will S. Jones for the WSJ sub, and Roger D. Jones for the Readers Digest. Then when I get mailed an ad for sex toys advertised to Ned Jones, I know the NYT sold my name to them.
You might ask your state's banking(?) regulatory authority or attorney general's office about that.
Like the idea of using fake name!
* You don't have to "talk" with a CSR online, it's a chat window
* You can cancel with an email to unsubscribe@nytimes.com
* By disabling auto-renewal the subscription will automatically be canceled at the end of the subscription period
What do you consider talking online, if not chat?
The pattern has gotten more familiar since then. It also seems like they've improved things.
You're just splitting hairs - you still have to have a conversation with someone, and the rep in the chat box makes it just as difficult as if you'd called in. When I canceled, the rep kept asking me if I was sure, reminded me multiple times what I would be missing out on if I went through with it, etc.. It took more than 5 minutes to get them to pull the trigger on canceling my account.
>You can cancel with an email to unsubscribe@nytimes.com
But I, and many other users, just want to click on "My Account" and then click a button that says "Cancel Account".
>By disabling auto-renewal the subscription will automatically be canceled at the end of the subscription period
NYT doesn't tell you that that's a method you can use to cancel your account, and not everyone is likely to think of it.
(Also, I acknowledge that perhaps you were being facetious and I just can't tell. But I still want to take this opportunity to point out the general principle.)
Example: https://www.change.org/p/target-stop-filling-the-world-with-...
Then you promote online saying stuff like "ABOUT TO SELL OUT! ONLY 50 TICKETS LEFT!" the week before to drive more sales. :P
As for the randomness I'd leave that up to the randomness of people signing up.
Of course I could be entirely wrong but I can see if a technical reason why it wouldn't go up cleanly, similar to YouTube views, they're not realtime.
How they promote petitions after you sign one by showing you 'trending' high shock value petitions is pretty scummy way to grab your attention and stay on the site signing more petitions. There has to be a better way to drive engagement than shoving polarizing clickbait petitions in my face.
Don't believe me? Sign up for the site and sign a petition, enjoy the flood of petition spam in your inbox.
"We are focused in on a problem that I think everyone recognizes," said Ms. Fischer, adding that she became interested in the problem after becoming annoyed in her personal experience with the techniques."
If we used programmer vernacular we might say she was "scratching her own itch".
First hand experience trumps everything.
Not sure why you're being snarky - how entities utilize cookies can be unsettling/'scary' to some.
Opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is principally rooted in compassion towards others — specifically, the human embryos which are killed in such research.
The thing is, we are in regulatory capture. The only time they get enforced is when the government wants a share of the profits (with fines that are < profits made) or when fledgling new businesses erode entrenched players (pokerstars and Sheldon Adelson)
At this point, I care about enforcement mechanisms... not more paper. We need to see CEOs behind bars if we want things to change.
(Harvard research paper - WIP) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-113_16977...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/how-ret...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/09/24/what...
If something is worth X at time Y at place Z to the buyer, then it doesn’t matter what the discount is or isn’t.
I lie about discounts all the time, all salespeople have to. Buying a house, car, land, businesses, etc. People in poorer countries where bartering is common do it for everyday items too like fruits and vegetables. They'll say "I'll make a deal for you I don't make for anyone else."...obviously they make it for others too, but is the buyer supposed to take it to heart? No, it's all in the game.
If the retailer says 70% off the rolling average sale price during the past 365 days, and then lies about THAT, I would feel cheated.
Advertising that you are selling something at a discount is information that your price might be lower than a competitor. Nobody likes getting a discount at store A then seeing the same item for less at store B, and as a result, people don’t care much about discounts in an absolute sense. Only that the information announcement of the discount is advertising price competition with other sellers or substitutes.
When a seller lies about the original price to claim a discount, they are banking on consumers just “believing the lie” that the fake, pre-discount price was a competitive price compared with competitors or substitutes.
People choose to believe it’s a malicious & morally wrong action for the seller to do that, to intentionally play against consumers’ penchant to seek the lowest price among various alternatives by creating a discount from an inflated reference price that is intentionally not competitive with other sellers, and to hope that it fools some consumers who trust the seller instead of doing the legwork to compare prices & learn if the pre-discount price was in line with competitors.
People just choose to believe a seller that chooses to do this is shitty and acting antagonistically to manipulate buyers. They expect sellers to be honest about sources of price competition.
A discount should be with regard to a prevailing market aggregated price, or some close & sincere approximation from sampling the prices at competitors or prices of substitutes. If the discount is in regard to some other way of setting the pre-discount price, then it’s intentionally manipulating people to play on the cognitive flaw that they will nonetheless believe the discount is in regard to some notion of a “fair market value” price level, especially in situations driven by short-term cognition.
It’s not a seller’s job to make sure the buyer is getting the lowest price. It’s not possible for a seller to know every single other seller’s price so I don’t see how anyone has a reasonable expectation to that in the first place.
People like to THINK they are getting a discount. They don’t care that the actually are. Clear evidence is JCPenney trying to offer people the best price without discounts:
https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/152018/lessons-f...
It’s how Kohl’s and Bed Bath And Beyond survive. Consumers rewarded sellers that offer 80% off ridiculously marked up items versus JC Penney who tried to offer an “honest” market price, and they forced JC Penney to engage in “deceptive” sale pricing again.
If they found out they were just given the illusion of saving money vs. actually saving money who would choose the illusion? I sure as hell wouldn't it seems totally illogical.
How would you even police something like 80% off a "fake" retail price? Create a database of all transactions for all items and compare to the historical average in x amount of days? Force all sellers to maintain records of their sales to compare against, and then go around doing spot checks?
Why not just have the government buy up billboards and TV ad spots educating everyone not to fall for the discounts and to compare the bottom line number they pay, and reward sellers that offer price transparency with their business?
Dark UI patterns and deceptive tactics are definitely grounds for legislation though, and those are the particulars of the article and this discussion not a nebulous discussion about %50 sales.
It's shitty and takes advantage of people. Dark patterns and automatically raising prices and making it near impossible to cancel accounts... this is what people are talking about legislating. Ff you are defending those dark patterns and deceptive tactics from being legislated against you are basically taking the position of a con man or someone who stands to profit from that behavior. They aren't providing a better service they're providing deceptive business practices.
Why would you try to implement some nationwide educational campaign instead of outlawing by definition a deceptive business practice? That would be a giant misallocation of resources and not even guaranteed to help. How are you going to educate the old and succeptible? They are the ones most prone to these attacks.
What you're saying isn't just late night TV ads can use $99.99 to appeal to customers, no one has a problem with that. You're saying sure go ahead and use Dark UI patterns and straight up deceiving pricing contracts to my elderly grandma, and you have no issue with that? She shoulda been better educated? OK then... Do you also think Kevin Trudeau is a stand up guy who deserves to be in business?
I'm not saying this at all. My original comment was a reply to vmurthy whose comment was specifically about discounting a raised price, and my response to him states that I'm commenting about that specific sales tactic.
For the record, I am against any practice that unnecessarily hides the price one is paying or makes buttons confusing and other "dark" UI patterns. However, if the price one is paying is clearly visible, I see no reason to regulate anything else regarding that price, such as x% off or limited time offer or that nonsense.
The FTC does hold advertisements to their claims and that's getting dangerously close depending on their exact language
So if the seller can't be expected to know their competitors prices how can the consumer be expected to keep track of all that information for all the products they buy? Additionally, sellers evaluate competitors' prices and compare them to their own all the time.
It’s fine for you to think that, but it means you’re just arguing with yourself, because most everyone agrees it is a fair expectation of sellers, and that when seller behavior deviates from this social norm, it is proper to view that as a manipulative or normatively condemnable seller behavior.
Sellers can’t have it both ways. You can’t act like your prices are lower by hyping them in a discount, but really be coyly saying you have no obligation to provide competitive prices and the discount reference point is purely fictional. That’s disingenuous and such a seller knows full well they are banking on tricking or manipulating people.
If only the final price mattered, shops wouldn't be advertising such discounts.
I’d rather see education in schools teaching people that discounts are sales tactics that should be ignored rather than laws governing discounts, which would be costlier to implement and enforce.
If you think discounts are completely meaningless, then completely banning advertising with discounts is very easy to implement and enforce. Much easier than to properly educate everybody how to arm themselves against deceptive sales practices (though I agree it would be nice if we could do that).
However, in the developed world, logistics and supply chains have sufficiently developed to allow for minuscule margins on many everyday, low price items that make it uneconomical to negotiate the value of each item to each buyer, so the seller just lists one price for everyone.
In markets in poorer countries, the seller might not do that, and it might be worth their time to negotiate each sale. If they say to one buyer "I'll sell this to you for 50% off today, and charges him the same price as yesterday, and the buyer agrees to buy", who is harmed?
Price discrimination is a natural part of markets, and the only reason it hasn't been happening is because it wasn't worth the retailers time in the US. But with automated systems coming into place, there is no more labor cost and so it's becoming economical to price discriminate again.
Most products are actually sold with a one size fits all price. People don't haggle over every single item they buy in a shop.
Most everyday items are sold “one size fits all” (but not in large quantities) in developed countries (since the seller's time is valuable enough to offset the extra revenue (or loss) from price discrimination), but there are quite a few places in the world where people still haggle over the price of tomatoes and onions.
But even in the developed world, once you move beyond low margin retail items that are not expiring goods, there is no single sale price. Sometimes price discriminating turns off more customers than the revenue it generates or the labor it costs the seller, so it doesn't make sense for a seller to do it. Sometimes it's worth it, so some sellers might.
So if a potential buyer sees something 70% discounted, that implies that originally, the market determined that higher price as a fair price: a price that at least some buyers would pay for this item. The buyer trusts the market that that is apparently a fair price, but today the buyer is in luck, because it's been discounted to below the usual market price!
If the seller advertises with a fake discount, he's betraying the buyer's trust in the free market by intentionally lying about what the market is willing to pay for this item.
This whole paragraph is wrong in my opinion. A 70% discount does NOT imply anything other than it's 70% off of some number that the seller is free to decide, since they own the product they are selling and I'm not aware of any laws dictating what they have to sell at.
The second part I don't agree with is a seller selling at "below" market price. There is no such thing, unless the seller is doing charity work. When a sale happens, that is at the market price, unless of course there is some collusion where the buyer and seller agree to do some other trade-off to avoid paying taxes, but that's neither here nor there in this conversation.
On popular sale days, such as Black Friday, the sellers aren't selling below market price. They are selling at the price that they think they need to in order to get the publicity/feet in the door that they think will lead to other sales. In effect, the seller is buying the buyer's time and attention and whatever probability the buyer has of spending more money on other things with the "discount" they offered.
If the amount from which it was discounted is utterly meaningless, then why mention it at all? Because the seller wants the buyer to believe the item is more valuable than it really is. That's why it's misleading.
The fact that the deception is legal, doesn't mean it's not deceptive. It is deceptive. It is very clearly, obviously, intentionally deceptive. The seller wants the buyer to believe they're getting a great deal that they're not getting, because the product was never actually meaningfully sold at that original price. That original price only exists to mislead the buyer.
Store A: sells item X at 80% off for $10 Store B: sells item X for $10
It's Kohl's and Bed Bath and Beyond and JCPenney's entire business model. Some people love waiting for their coupons at home and figuring out where they can get the most "%" off.
Should we outlaw store A?
"I'd rather see education in schools teaching people that $instances-of-abuse are members of $family-of-methods-of-abuse that one should protect themselves against".
Funny how for almost everything else, the abuse itself is considered both illegal and morally repugnant, yet abusive sales tactics are legally above board and the profession itself is considered respectable.
If I'm a seller, I can raise the price 100% at 10AM, and then put a sign that says 70% off. And then the next day, I can reduce the price 100%. The very use of ambiguous wording is a signal that it's a sales tactic.
No one advertises 50% off the median average sale price in the past 30 days, because then it would be abuse. But that's not what any seller advertises. Stating that someone else saved Y dollars is also ambiguous. Saved compared to what?
Booking.com claiming so and so is selling out quickly! What is quickly defined as?
Until there are falsifiable metrics being falsified, I don't see what the abuse is.
> If I'm a seller, I can raise the price 100% at 10AM, and then put a sign that says 70% off. And then the next day, I can reduce the price 100%.
Sure, you can do that. Or, you could simply list the price that lets you have some margin while still being competitive. Why would you do the former rather than the latter? Only because of a clear intent to abuse the customer.
> Booking.com claiming so and so is selling out quickly! What is quickly defined as?
Words have meanings. I can't tell you what exactly "quickly" is defined, but I believe everyone reasonable would assume it's something around minutes to hours in this particular business. Ask yourself, what would you assume?
> Until there are falsifiable metrics being falsified, I don't see what the abuse is.
I.e. until there's a clear and unambiguous statement that turns out to be purposefully false, you don't see a problem? Most lies aren't using clear and unambiguous language precisely because that makes them easier to spot; it doesn't change the fact that the intent is malicious towards your fellow human beings.
JCPenney tried it, lost a ton of business, and had to reverse course. Turns out, buyers like being given a fake marked up price and then buying at a "discount". See my other comment for source, it was a very famous example of a famous Apple executive trying to do what makes sense on paper, but not in practice.
>Words have meanings. I can't tell you what exactly "quickly" is defined, but I believe everyone reasonable would assume it's something around minutes to hours in this particular business. Ask yourself, what would you assume?
I wouldn't assume anything, because there is not enough information given by the seller. I also know that a seller's incentive is to sell, and that as a buyer, the only thing I need to be concerned with is how much I'm paying.
>I.e. until there's a clear and unambiguous statement that turns out to be purposefully false, you don't see a problem? Most lies aren't using clear and unambiguous language precisely because that makes them easier to spot; it doesn't change the fact that the intent is malicious towards your fellow human beings.
How are the courts supposed to prove intent? Especially when a seller has the legal right to change the price of their goods anytime they like. Intent also doesn't have to be malicious. As I showed in my earlier example, the sellers that use discounts make more money...because certain people like shopping at places that give big discounts, they like the feeling of getting a discount. I don't think the harm to society rises to the level of involving the courts in this case.
Is it that the buyers like it, or simply that the deception is effective? If you point out to buyers that the marked up price was fake and that the discounted price was always the real price, do they actually like that?
Nobody is denying that the deception is effective. But it being effective doesn't make it any less deceptive.
And it succeeds at misleading the customer, or nobody would be doing this. A misled customer is not an informed customer. For a free market it's vital that customers are well-informed, therefore this kind of deception hurts the free market. The customer agrees to the transaction based on a lie.
Even if technically, from a certain perspective it's technically true ("this morning before I opened the shop, the price was indeed that much higher for 5 minutes"), it's still deception.
Look, be whoever you want, but own it, don't hide behind equivocation. No one else is buying (haha) any of this. The only person you're working to convince here is yourself.
Consumers are the other half of the problem though. At least some of the scummy tactics are psycological hacks to get around real irrational behaviors that actually work against both the consumer and the business. The rest are dark patterns meant to manipulate and coerce that work strictly for the business, consumers be damned. I'm not sure where the line is.
Side note: Even to this day, I still catch myself sometimes thinking/saying the cost of something is $X rather than $X+1, when the listing price of something is $X.99, and I curse myself for the foolishness :P
Do you have examples of such behaviors?
We lived in a military community and I literally couldn’t count the number of times a customer would walk in and ask for a military discount. We were trained to politely explain our pricing and encourage shoppers to price-check our offerings against any place else. And often customers would demand to give us a discount because they served in $MILITARY_CONFLICT.
No matter how much we tried pointing out that our shoes were effectively on sale in perpetuity, they simply wouldn’t believe us. The psychology of the sale is real.
I've investigated a few of these sorts of apps on Shopify. They do use actual customer names but how long ago those orders came in seems a little dubious.
I believe it's not so much to promote fear of missing out - other apps do that better - e.g. ones that copy booking.com's pattern of 'only x left!'.
Instead, they're a very good way to signal to potential buyers that the (usually small) shop is being used by other shoppers to increase trust.
Few people go in to empty restaurants.
It would be interesting to know if there are legal implications to lying about your visitors using services like these, though.
From 1: "Advertisements with specific claims can be substantiated with evidence"
Many of these don't work long-term. These sites won't last long when they get one-time users who are deal seekers. This reminds me of back when all video sites had 10 ads and pop-ups or blogging sites. They all learned eventually.
I predict two dark patterns will stay with us. Making it hard to unsubscribe and designing the "YES" button to be more attractive to click than the "NO" button. They don't involve lying and they work surprisingly well.
Would shaming designers that are complicit in these dark patterns be a similar, favourable way of movement towards a better direction?
I actually finished a book that tries to do that[1]. But I don't believe enough designers are told from their peers that maybe the way they’re exercising their knowledge of design theory and psychology is being shitty towards people.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44432844-ruined-by-desig...
I also enjoyed and support the phrase from the article: "confirmshaming."
The next question would be "why is the browser advertising that it's in incognito mode?", but that's not a question for the NYT.
If this were loot boxes, then maybe we'd be having a different discussion, but unless they're tricking you into something other than what is advertised, then the onus ultimately falls upon you to control your desire to purchase something.
Personally I lean on the "I am the final arbiter of my purchasing decisions" side, but surely this principle would have to be applied consistently (and what this looks like is I have bought almost nothing online ever)
And ask yourself-- who benefits the most from the borrow checker? Because it's sure not John Q. Programmer ...
Blaming consumers for their lack of self control is pure hypocrisy. Where do you think sellers got their desire to get so much money ? From their own lack of self control.
A rational mind does not need or desire millions of dollars. It needs what it requires to live a happy life : food, health, social interactions (quality & quantity). Anything else is pure irrational, pulsion driven excessive desires.