Hacker News Reader

Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

I get the occasional customer asking for a refund because they claim they accidentally placed an order. For a while I just thought it was a stupid excuse, how do you accidentally enter your credit card number into a form but now with the browser auto completing everything maybe they’re actually serious?

View on HN

Just a guess, but maybe there were curious about the shipping fees.

Probably most of my online purchases start with trying to figure out where the package will be shipped from so that I can factor in import taxes to the EU. Surprisingly many webshops don't indicate their business of location clearly.

Yup, it's something of a dark pattern by many companies. They make it as hard as possible to see what the final cost will be until you're deep in the order process. Oops, if you're dealing with something that never has extra costs and thus doesn't have a final cost stage to ordering it wouldn't be hard to imagine someone actually ordering when they intended to get the final cost.

Likewise for shipping time. I need it by X and will not order if it's going to arrive later. That one isn't as much of a dark pattern as it's rarely done for deceptive reasons.

Some people will add things to their cart and then wait a few hours (or days) to see if they really want it. If they do, it's in their cart, and there's no reason to go find it again. If they don't, they just remove it.

I can see people who shop like this accidentally hitting "purchase" every now and then.

I once ordered something, because I wanted it, but then the vendor immediately signed me up for their shitty mailing list without asking. This upset me so much that I immediately cancelled the order.

They decided to ignore my cancellation and ship me the thing anyways. Now we're in a pitched battle over who should pay to fix their mistake. Regardless of the outcome, I'm never going to buy anything from them again.

Once I had to request a refund from Amazon because I did in fact accidentally order something. The best guess I have is that my phone was in my pocket, I was sweaty, and apparently the sweat and movement opened the Amazon app and ordered one of the recommended items while I was working outside. The order date coincided with only that as a real option (meaning, I wasn't drinking or doing drugs that day so that I might've forgotten the order).

I was super confused when a tool I had looked at three weeks prior turned up at my house.

So you "butt ordered" stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com