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Comment by pwg | Hacker News Reader

And my related pet-peeve, entry of credit card number comes before display of shipping and handling charges for the order. I've abandoned carts at sites that did not provide S/H before they wanted my credit card number.

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I fought (and lost) against this payflow at a job because Marketing guessed that the sunk cost of time spent filling out the CC info form made users more likely to just click "buy" once the final cost was revealed. Stats backed them up :(

A dark pattern for sure, becoming more frequent.

in the us maybe you can file complaints with the ftc

there must be an eu equivalent

On what grounds?

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (Directive 2005/29/EC). Article 7(4)(c).

> in the us maybe you can file complaints with the ftc

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.

send them a letter

perhaps better, hire a lawyer to do so

Funny enough the time spent is basically nil with auto fill.

This is how stats lie. Success is based on measurements across short time spans because that's the only way to reliably correlate features to behaviors. There's no good way to measure the impact of a bad decision across years or decades, so the dark pattern gets away scot free. The only thing stopping it would be a particularly impactful survey or focus group, or worse yet user outcry.

Most companies do not exist for decades, and many, even for years. They either get acquired, or, more often, dissolved.

Hence the idea to make a quick buck now, like there is no tomorrow, because tomorrow may actually not be %)

Bingo.

Not quite sure what you mean, wouldn't an A/B test be able to answer questions like these pretty easily?

Across what time scale? Are you going to run your A/B test over the course of years to see if the changes drive users away?

This was my argument at the time: build long-term trust with your users (including in your UI) is more important than short-term gains.

I hope they also measured the amount of people that abandoned because of it.

Tried to book a flight a week ago. One site was showing the price 30% less than other sites. Last step, entered my CC info and clicked "Purchase". "Oops, the flight is no longer available for that price, current price: x (the price other sites were showing). Do you want to buy anyway?". To be fair, the dialog with the "Buy anyway" and "Cancel" buttons weren't using any further dark patterns.

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...

That looks to be a classic bait-and-switch, which is considered a form of fraudulent advertising in many jurisdictions. It may not be worth the hassle for you, but you probably could report them if you want.

Probably depends on whether the entity baiting you is the same as (or represents) the entity you're ultimately purchasing from. If the aggregator is merely redirecting you to the airline and getting a kickback, as opposed to actually being a middleman, maybe that's a loophole in bait-and-switch law?

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.

That sucks, but to be fair that's not usually intentional, but simply a cached price that hasn't updated. You see this especially with flights for some reason due to the complexity -- airlines change prices incredibly frequently but aggregator sites can't refresh them all instantly. I'd forgive a site if I only saw this happen once/occasionally, but I'd report it to regulators if I saw it happen as a pattern.

With how laggy those sites are, I figured they are indeed pulling the price from the origin... Interesting that they'd have their own cache and still be so slow.

Can’t recall where I’ve heard it, but that lag is almost always artificial—meant to convince the user that time was spent finding a good deal.

Not updating the cache before/when asking for CC information is at the very least knowingly ignoring the problem, and likely intentionally ignoring the problem because the user is more likely to continue anyway once you've tricked them into giving their CC information and they just need to click yes to be done...

I hope jurisdictions that have "truth in advertising" laws bring the hammer down on such "negligent" violations.

Unfortunately the airline industry is both filled with caches upon caches upon caches when it comes to prices and also deceptive dark patterns.

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.

Delta was doing that to me a few years back. I was so frustrated I called them to complain and actually got the ticket for the price they advertised. Still annoying when you go through the checkout multiple times on different days only to get the same not available anymore alert.

Name and shame, please!

... so that others do not have to go through this experience ...

You'll notice that in Germany, online shops tend to have the shipping costs listed or at least linked right next to the price on the product page.

Because there is a law for that.

How do they know the shipping price before they have the person’s address? Surely it costs more to ship to Australia than to Austria.

You wouldn't know, but you could ask in advance and show a prompt otherwise.

Geolocation based on IP.

I guess it depends on countries, usually IP geolocation here (Italy) for landlines can be off by hundreds of kms.

Doesn't matter as long as the country is correct.

Only if logged out or course, if logged in you can display the price for the default address.

the easiest (not the best) way is to display the highest cost then lowering it on checkout.

but a german store shipping to germans could just list the in-germany shipping cost. It would be correct for all germans.

German shipping companies charge the same for everybody in the country, no matter the distance?

Yes and that is true for most countries.

That's insanely inefficient

It's close enough. I'd expect last mile delivery to be the biggest cost driver anyways.

The stated goal is often to help the more remote parts, even if it costs more to ship to a small town in Brittany than to Paris.

Yes, we all understand the goal for the national post. USPS charges the same for a first-class letter no matter what and has some flat-rate options based on size. But even they discriminate based on location on most packages. And we're talking about private sellers who are incented to minimize costs, using private shipping companies.

It might be different in the US but in most places I know, the national carrier is cheapest and the private ones like FedEx or TNT are used for special requirements, like faster shipping or special dimensions. There are a few cheap private shipping companies but they are also flat rate.

Because the countries are so small? In the USA, you could be shipping 30 miles or 3000 miles (not counting including Alaska and Hawaii).

It is not true for the United States. The cost varies based on the distance between the shipper and the receiver. Shipping from New York to New Jersey is much less expensive than from New York to San Francisco.

I know, it's just how it works for most countries, because most countries are smaller than the US and often the national post offices have a mandate to treat remote parts the same way as the more accessible parts.

Some only ship within the country, listing the shipping cost directly. Others link to their page listing the shipping costs, which could be e.g. having costs for each country with a "free if over XX EUR" note.

Many commerce sites estimate your location by IP address, and give a shipping cost and time estimate right out. They of course allow you to enter your real address and get a more precise figure.

I find it useful.

I'll add to that: always tell customer up front if there is stock or if back-ordered. Burned too many times by the silent back-order.

It in no way justifies it but this is usually because left hand doesn't know about the right something something good engineering. You have the site that's independently run and exists as nothing but a client to the other system that handles inventory and fulfillment blah blah business! And that system isn't made in-house so you're at the whim of whatever order submission "thing" (because it's not always an API, the horror) it exposes to you and sadly a lot of them the only way to see if you can actually complete a purchase is to try and see if it errs.

Suplemental: Stop listing things in product pages and search results, just to click through and find it's out of stock.

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.

If we are complaining about credit cards, mine is the large number of sites that ask for credit card details out of order. Number, then name, then zip code, maybe month/year or some equally cursed implementation. Even better if tabbing between fields is equally random.

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?

I wonder how many of these are intentionally randomizing the form you get during checkout, in an effort to thwart automated purchases by bot accounts. I don't know anything about this space, but I've definitely noticed that my bank does this with its login flow. There's at least a dozen variations and domains I might get redirected to on any given day. Does anyone who works in this space know of a similar practice for online checkout?

Really??? That sounds insanely insecure by design. If I tried to log in to a secure site and was redirected to a random site I'd assume I was the victim of a link backing attack and back out. Normalising this kind of behavior by a bank sounds like a very bad idea.

Also, why can't sites display your card number in groups of four digits just like they're shown on your card. This makes it much easier to verify your card number for people with poor eye sight. Some sites do, most don't.

Visa/MC numbers are 4x4, as you are describing but AMEX is 15 digits and Diners Club and Carte Blanche are 14 digits.

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 ...

You can pretty much infer the type of card as they enter it, the with first 2 digits signaling the card and this format in 90% of use cases worldwide.

enough letter spacing is enough for users with poor eyesight

I have a good eyesight and still select 8 middle digits to make a verification contrast. Grouping is about memory, not eyesight.

I’m having trouble figuring out what this was aimed at. My comment was aimed more towards what the website can do and how it formats numbers when a user enters them.

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.

CC inputs know within 2 or 3 digits... it's how some entry forms display an Amex, MC, Visa icon in the input window.

I dont think I've ever seen a Diners Club/Carte Blanche in my lifetime, with a DC/CB number, most of those are issued as Discover or Master Card now.

Or at least allow you to put the spaces in yourself and then just strip them out.

Wow, I feel like I buy a lot of stuff online but I don't think I've ever come across that. It sounds super bad.

Is there a particular site or commerce platform that is known for implementing this?

Those drop-shipper websites which are extremely numerous (and often haven't been running for very long) are quite guilty of 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...

few days ago I was buying something on Amazon Japan and not only I had to provide credit card first, but the price of the item itself changed when for international shipping. still, I wanted the thing and and it's half the price against already imported, but what gives?

There can be export tariffs or something.

That was my after thought, after I posted. From UX perspective it was surprising and unpleasantly vague.

I always type in fake information the first time to see the price. If I abandon the cart they often use the information I gave them to spam me.

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