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Comment by hourago | Hacker News Reader

That seems to be done on purpose but I am not sure why. Do people really buy more stuff because they clicked "buy" to get the info? Or is it just some arbitrary metric that is being improved without having real impact on the business?

Maybe to have a separate "get more info" is worse for business. At least for me, the opposite it is true. It makes me hesitate to click in the "buy" button just to find more about the product.

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Linkedin and other job advertisement sites get paid per "Apply" click or redirections, so they gate keep the information on purpose.

That's exactly it, hitting "apply" is taken as a performance metric, so (and I'm sure there's a 'law' for this) everything is optimized to meet that metric.

Yup, that's called Goodhart law

It's not uncommon for me to 70% of the way through a checkout process because that's the only way to figure out how much shipping is. I'm not trying to buy the product, just get a single number - but pretending to buy it is often the only way to get that number!

I think part of it is to separate information to better know that a user was interested in a product and read the information further and perhaps it was price or purchasing conditions that turned them off.

When you advertise traditionally you don't get a lot of information back from consumers other than those who start or make a purchase. The more actions you put between discovery and purchase, the more you can refine parts of the process.

There are probably other psychological elements at play as well about gradually introducing information so you can strategically present the better aspects of something before you talk about say an ugly cost.

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