Don't force users to register before they can buy (2015)
nngroup.com
nngroup.com
Been searching for a particular pair of skis recently, and so many places listed them, only to click through and find they have no stock in any size. Complete waste of time.
No, I would not like to buy anyway, but to welcome to you to the list od websites I'll never use again, [redacted].com...
On the other hand, since GP furnished payment details to the baiter, I guess it really is a middleman, in which case you're absolutely correct.
I hope jurisdictions that have "truth in advertising" laws bring the hammer down on such "negligent" violations.
The dark patterns have got better over time (as meta-search like Skyscanner and Kayak drive so much traffic to sites and demand honest pricing - travel agents either have to clean up their act or forgo meta search traffic) but the many, many layers of caches remain.
... so that others do not have to go through this experience ...
Have these designers never looked at their own credit card before? Or is there just an incredible desire to be different that they require a unique take for this already solved problem?
Is there a particular site or commerce platform that is known for implementing this?
They sometimes use this as a way of "bait and switch" - we're sorry, we're out of stock, but if you want to use the credit for this item on other things...
A dark pattern for sure, becoming more frequent.
there must be an eu equivalent
As someone with complaints relevant to the FTC... where do I file a complaint with the FTC that falls outside of their website workflow? Their website appears to shoehorn everyone into payment disputes and fraud. But the FTC is supposed to protect consumers from more than just payment disputes and fraud.
perhaps better, hire a lawyer to do so
Hence the idea to make a quick buck now, like there is no tomorrow, because tomorrow may actually not be %)
Because there is a law for that.
Only if logged out or course, if logged in you can display the price for the default address.
but a german store shipping to germans could just list the in-germany shipping cost. It would be correct for all germans.
I find it useful.
So you need to pick your poison:
Either ask people what kind of card it is and then group their numbers nicely ... or don't ask them what kind of card it is (since you can tell anyway by the numbers and schema) and have ungrouped numbers.
I prefer the latter, actually, since it annoys me to be asked a question that the site can infer the answer to ...
Building in accessibility is a net win to all users, even those who think they may not directly benefit, spacing things out in a reasonable and predictable way helps everyone and especially those with eyesight, memory, and attention issues.
If it's something I really need and can't get anywhere else (and if I don't intend to have a protracted business relationship with the seller) I usually sign up with snarky addresses (that I still receive) like: SellerDomain-I-hate-that-you-make-me-register@mydomain.com
Not only can I easily squelch all future email from the seller but there's at least a remote chance somebody will recognize my ire and think about their process.
I don't understand how this behaviour can persist when it's customer repellant. (Unless they're optimizing for a different captive market, and really aren't interested in my business).
The other answer is you optimize for what you can measure. It's hard to know when users are dropping off at the account-signup wall; it's easy to know when an existing user bites on your re-marketing efforts.
- The information Google gives to the merchant is usually the same that I'd give the merchant anyway to make a purchase even if I wasn't making an account, assuming Google is being truthful when telling me what information it transmits.
- I don't need to worry about whether the merchant properly hashes passwords.
- If my Google account gets closed, it doesn't matter, assuming my goal was to not have an account with the merchant in the first place.
- It's at least as frictionless.
The one who gets this mostly right is Shopify. They're the "Stripe" of shopping carts.
I totally stopped and will register an account wherever I give my credit card. The difference with guest checkout is usually infinitesimal and I actually want to keep somewhere (in my password vault in this case) the places that have my full info and where to contact them.
I get why companies do this, but IMO if I enter my email address and have not given permission for it to be used except for a given transaction, then it shouldn’t be used at all if the transaction isn’t ratified.
It’s one step removed from tracking character input in a text box and capturing an email address that was subsequently deleted prior to submitting a form.
It's a golf wiki if anyone is curious: https://golfcourse.wiki
That’s how I ended up justifying it.
Please validate emails OR let me click on a "that wasn't me" link.
If not, I will flag your email, and company, as spam.
Some time later, I started receiving emails about my sofa purchase, addressed nice and personally to "Paul" (not my name) and then some time after that, emails about my "finance agreement".
It was all legit, except for the fact that none of it was intended for me. Someone had been in to the store after me, and somehow they'd entered my email address on this guys form, he's never had any of his documents about his finance agreement, or when his sofa was going to be delivered, etc, because I had it all.
Hope the guy got his sofa in the end, but company made it almost impossible for me to tell them they were sending all this stuff to the wrong email, in the end I just blocked them.
I've followed their life from their employment offer, maternity leave plans, childbirth hospital trip, baby photos, pet purchases, school registration, and recently their child is registered in a gifted student program. I'm almost part of the family!
gmail, for instance, shows off how awful google is if you stop relying on it but open it fairly often. I don't think i've received any non-automated emails on my gmail account in over a year, but now all of the tabs are chock full of junk, aliexpress, spam, aliexpress, scams, aliexpress...
I lucked out on fastmail grandfathering me in to the $5/yr plan that allows you a single MX domain endpoint, so i have any-email-i-want@mydom.ain for around $20/year including taxes, DNS, and domain registration.
See https://www.bar.com/ for reference.
* https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/bh-wp-account-and-login-ux
Nobody wakes up and decides to pay someone else’s car tax. And if they do, if the money is good, who cares?
The other thing is the need for an account at all. With a lot of online merchants, I don’t want an ongoing relationship. Take your cash and leave me alone.
Or they do, because they woke up to a car from a parent who isn't doing this newfangled internet thing but would like the car tax paid.
Some people would be genuinely upset, until I pointed out that the transaction receipt only showed that a deposit had been made, and that I wasn't revealing anything that the depositor didn't already know. There was no known threat vector that we could figure.
I won't visit Medium or Substack blogs at all because of this awful pattern.
[1] https://libredirect.codeberg.page
EDIT: I will still attempt to avoid your shitty substack/medium blog if literally any other sources are available. Please stop using this garbage.
And for heck's sake, automatically associate previous guest transactions with a new account when a user finally decides to take the plunge.
The thing about making an account that is so annoying is that I already need at least two accounts to buy something online, usually. I need some kind of account that lets me pay for things, like a credit card or paypal. I then also need an email account to check out, usually.
In the EU, it is very probable that if you are registering for buying something on a "national" site (as an example a .de or a .it, particularly when the site is also only in German or Italian) you want the stuff sent to a national address.
The drop-down list almost invariably is alphabetically ordered, and contains all states in the world, i.e. it starts with Afghanistan, and often on mobile/touch these lists are not particularly easy to scroll.
It is a little thing, but still putting a pre-selected default for the state where you send like 99.999% of orders might smooth a little the attrition.
The dark patterns have been designed and A-B tested. They must have shown to increase in shareholder value, unfortunately, likely in the short term.
For example, I was working on my furnace this weekend and needed a part. Found on supplyhouse.com. No fuckery involved, I paid them asking price and they sent me the part.
Why can't all transactions be so simple? Why does every site need a popover, multiple coupons, cookie warnings, privacy policies, etc? Maybe I'm just out of touch, but this all drives me -away-. I just want to pay money for X, receive X, and be done. If you make that hard, I'll look elsewhere.
i usually enter the email address "marketing@<websitedomain>" so that they then spam themselves
One thing that really surprised us: a significant number of return users clicked "forgot password?" before attempting signup. We deduced that they believed they had an account but couldn't remember the password (this was before password managers).
When they'd did access their account, it had all their order history, email support history, etc all pre-populated.
This approach did not require us to retain any additional data on top of what we would have retained with only keeping their unauthenticated (guest) checkout orders on file.
I also hate websites where they hide your password while typing it in. Who can enter a password like Xaa3$#%^&*JqUIx correctly while blind? "Three attempts and your account is locked out!"
AAAGGGHHHHH.
javascript:Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll(%27input%5Btype%3Dpassword%5D%27)).map(function(el)%7Bel.setAttribute(%27type%27,%27text%27)%7D)With Firefox, setting the "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" about:config setting to false stops this dark pattern, allowing one to paste into fields that the website designer attempted to block one from pasting into.
...You mean all of them? Including this one?
You may consider using a password manager[1] that allows to auto-fill the password field. Use xkcd-based passphrase[2] for the master password to make it easier to type.
[1]: just not LastPass with their regular security breaches. Personally, I recommend Bitwarden.
It should be possible to go through as much of the process as possible without having to sign up first.
It certainly makes it technically more difficult to develop, but it's incredibly powerful and user friendly.
The downside is that we can’t put folks in an e-mail drip campaign, which would help us educate our users and increase our conversion rate. But we hate spam, so we don’t view not-spamming as much of a downside.
Your Order Number is 123456789
Your Order PIN is 12345
With your Order Number and Order PIN, you can review or track your order >HERE<.
Please note that we have no way to reach you if any problem occurs with your order, unless you review your order.
Click >HERE< for a printable receipt. (It will NOT show your PIN.)