Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
edit: ok this is done by UOKiK, a consumer protection agency. This agency has supposedly been doing a stellar job keeping an eye on everything from banking to e-commerce sector.
Compared to Allegro, it has close to no offers, and search engine. Just. Doesn't. Work.
My friends who moved back from the Bay Area still prefer to use Amazon, but they use Amazon.de instead - similar shipping times, and much better selection and reliability.
amazon.de on the other hand has English version and stuff is sent from warehouses in Poland anyway.
I'm not sure enough to know if that's sarcastic, but the circumstances make me wonder if this was to promote local competitors or score political points.
I find the eBay-esque artifact interface absurd. It's likely Amazon hasn't found a way because an environment that isn't a monopoly isn't attractive to begin with for that business model.
But think about it - when was the last time you actually got a good comparison in this market between allegro and a dedicated e-commerce site? For many product categories the latter almost doesn't even exist anymore.
If Amazon is being treated just like all the other companies, and protection agencies are doing their job, then they wouldn't be able to use their neo-colonial business model.
See: what Amazon itself has done in the Middle East among Uber, Delivery Hero, and all the other Big Companies With More Capital have done to dominate these markets. It can't work if the governmental watchdogs like market and/or consumer authorities are able to block them.
Amazon is not in my country, but Amazon DE does ship here for not too much. It's often cheaper and sometimes even quicker to order from Amazon DE than a local e-retailer (they often don't have items in stock locally, and need to ship from a warehouse in another country).
I wanted to purchase some items, and it gave the usual "order in the next 8 hours for delivery on Sunday". I wanted to add some other items later, and forgot about it. I finally got around to placing the order two days later. It gave me a delivery date of... the same Sunday.
To explain the two estimates days apart both returning the same Sunday, consider that the week is heterogeneous; maybe some regional hop is available specifically on Saturday regardless of how early you order.
It's the same thing as going on a website and it says "order within next 30 minutes for a 50% discount" and then you come back an hour later and it still says the same thing - it creates an incentive on you to purchase by creating an illusion of urgency. It's the illusion part that the regulators have a problem with.
But if most of the time they do make the deadline, and the times that they do not are caused by problems that arose unexpectedly after the order was places, it is not a dark pattern.
I think the contention here is that they intentionally overcommitted. One would have to see the statistics on how often they miss the promised timeline.
Of course if there was a road closure or something like that then the consequences would be minimal, but it sounds like they caught Amazon systematically making promises it can't keep.
However the countdown could add some pressure if you're still deciding on buying something or not, in the form of "now or never FOMO".
I might give an ETA for some code, say 3 days, then do something else and find an easier way to do the task I was asked about earlier, dude to happenstance or even lower demands on my time ... so that later when asked again I might give an even even earlier ETA.
Background: CA requires a warning on food that has some threshold level of carcinogenic or harmful substance - esp lead and arsenic. It’s called CA 65 Warning or a Proposition 65 warning.
I make sure to look for these on the images of labels and ingredients when I buy food especially ground spices off Amazon.
The dark pattern: Label images show no CA 65 warning but when the food turns up it has such a warning! I bought bulk powdered cinnamon with this issue.
Recently I noticed that while Amazon does not show the warning on the label it has an innocuous small print link in your shopping cart that leads to the full text of the warning should you notice it and click on it
This is now in the vicinity of actually increasing the probability of physical harm. Because of not having the warning in the label AND having an almost ignorable warning at checkout when you are more focused on getting things done and move on to the next thing, as opposed to when you are in a more deliberative state while browsing.
Just want to put that out for folks in CA who might care about such things. I’m sure they wouldn’t try shtuff like this in EU.
I suppose they could display regional versions of the product page based on geolocation, but that’s a huge layer of added complexity and they may not be legally required to alter their website to comply.
So I’d chalk it up to neglect or indifference, rather than a deliberate dark pattern.
And they understand how to properly package things, which is what I would expect after they've shipped a billions packages over the past 25+ years. When I order from Target or Vitacost, there's a 25% chance that they throw things in a box, add a single inflated plastic bag, and ship it. Glass jars arrive smashed, shampoo bottles crack open and leak over the other items, etc. It's like day 1 for Amazon's competition in terms of packaging.
https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplay/comments/1509aii/madmusc...
My personal experience was that I signed up for a monthly plan at a reduced price, so far so good. I immediately regretted my purchase because I realised I'd been taken in by their shiny ads and was basically paying for a shiny UX and nothing else as there is no credible health consultant behind it all. That's fine, most apps are probably like that in the health domain.
What is particularly terrible is when I went to cancel the plan they do not let you immediately cancel. Instead they ask you why you want to cancel and upsell you another more expensive plan based on your response. They provide no cancel button at any point, so there is no way to not accept. I refreshed the page and realised they had added a free month of a plan which would cost me close to 100 euros the next month. So not only was I unable to cancel my existing subscription, I would also have to pay more the following month. I somehow managed to cancel everything and get a refund, probably being in the EU helped, but in the link you can read the comments of those less fortunate.
Amazon has lost that, with their "No, I don't want to buy Prime", "No, I really don't want to buy Prime", and "QUIT TRYING TO GET ME TO BUY YOUR PRIME SERVICE" check out system.
Recently I tried unsubscribing from The Athletic (now owned by NYT).
They use every dark pattern in the book and multiple times also make it seem like you finally were successful only for no real confirmation message.
The only company that I know of that makes it easier to 'unsubscribe' than to 'subscribe' is netflix. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Didn't have to call them and have them guilt trip me into staying. Or chat with someone or some AI. Just cancel. Though they do email you deals from time to time. But even then only every few weeks or so.
"Zoom's forced app is irresponsible" - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/zooms-forced-app-is-irrespo...
Shady patterns mean shady company
A lot of these kinds of dark patterns sacrifice long term user satisfaction and brand reputation for short-term gains in questionable internal metrics (metrics that are often tied to bonuses for people who couldn't care less about the long-term success of the company or its customers).
It's just WebRTC, like Google Meet, Jitsi, etc.
When I clicked the zoom link it opens a browser window and pops up a system dialog to launch the zoom app. After I hit "cancel" on that dialog I was on a page with a large "Launch Meeting" button (and no link to use the web version). Then, I clicked the "Launch Meeting" button and it opened the same system dialog again. Then, after I clicked cancel on that dialog a small link appeared at the bottom that says: "Having issues with Zoom Client? Join from Your Browser"
If you don't see the join from browser link even after jumping through Zoom's dark pattern hoops, ask the meeting admin to enable it.
Being fined for not offering an obvious web-only client.
Which of course it does. There is a lot of price fuckery going on, where they lower it to drive subscriptions and then raise the price above the average price.
I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted, because subscribe & save is obviously a dark pattern along the lines of "entice subscription, get people to forget about it" only with variable pricing on top of it.