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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

I need to buy a mattress and I had one in my cart from a week ago and last night I picked a different mattress and went to the checkout page. Then I saw there were two mattresses in it. It had the dark pattern of no cancel button so I had to click back and now I'm considering getting it elsewhere. Oh, and they also tried to get me to sign up for a Prime trial.

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Checkout pages never offer "cancel" buttons or "back" buttons. They are designed to corral you into the checkout process without recourse to returning to shop around some more.

This is, of course, easily bypassed with browser controls, but I agree that it is a dark pattern which can trap less savvy people into pressing forward, because it seems there's nowhere else to go.

"Back" has the old anxiety of Confirm Form Resubmission, so a cancel or close button would be better.

When all else fails, for any site like this, I close the browser tab. If I choose to reopen the site, I'll be back on the home page and my cart may or may not be empty.

Sorry to say, but there's a "delete" option for every item on the checkout page. Just click the quantity dropdown and change it to "delete". Simple as.

I don't mind, for whatever reason it wasn't usable for me. And maybe it wasn't there.

Edit: I checked again. It isn't there. Note that I said checkout, not my cart. It has big CTA buttons to go straight to checkout without first going to the cart.

Not on the "checkout" screen.

It is there for the "cart" screen but once you get to checkout, you are stuck either proceeding or abandoning the page.

If by "checkout" screen you mean the "Review items and shipping" where the yellow "Place your order" button exists to actually "order" the items, then "delete" is hiding behind the "Qty" dropdown that is present on each item (at least for me). You have to click the "Qty 1" dropdown, and only then does the "delete" option appear.

So it is well hidden away, but at least for my Amazon account, one can delete from the "checkout" screen.

I'd be careful about buying mattresses from Amazon as quite a few have been found to have fiberglass.

I was only looking at one brand, Zinus. I could order from them directly at a slight premium. However now I will look at more reviews. Thanks.

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