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Comment by mdrzn | Hacker News Reader

I've never had any issues with the countdown clock; it's usually for orders that I want to receive quickly, and it tells me "if you order within the next 2 hours, it will arrive tomorrow". So, I doubt that it's a dark pattern (at least in Italy). Then again, if third-party sellers are using this system as a dark pattern, that's a different matter.

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Judging by the parent comment, the dark part is the fact that it might be fake pressure. As in - it's true that it will arrive tomorrow if you order within the next 2 hrs, but it will actually arrive tomorrow even if you take 4 hrs.

Isn’t the explanation just that delivery estimates have a wide margin of error? To guarantee delivery by a target date the order must be placed by the beginning of the margin, but if you order within the margin there’s some probability of getting that date by chance.

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.

Sure, but the regulator in this case is making an argument that it's creating an unfair pressure to make you purchase a thing, and that the timer is consistently shorter than it needs to be.

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.

I mean usually the cut-off time is to "order by 8 PM to get the product delivered the next day". I'm not convinced that setting the order deadline at 8 PM instead of 10 PM significantly boosts sales. E-commerce platforms are full of dark patterns, but on Amazon (perhaps because I go there when I already know what I want to buy), I haven't noticed many. Another potential dark pattern is that the lowest price is shown for offers with Prime included, while sometimes there are lower prices available for the same product shipped without Prime. However, even in this case, I don't have any complaints. Not defending Amazon obviously, but since I pay for Prime, I definitely want the fastest shipment possible.

The dark pattern is actually the opposite. People who ordered in the next 2 hours might not get it the next day. If you tell someone "buy it in the next 2 hours to receive it tomorrow", you better make sure they get it tomorrow.

I don't see how that is necessarily a dark pattern. It would be a dark pattern if they were saying that when they knew it would not make it in time.

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.

> 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.

Delivery date is part of the implied contract. They would be fine if they just called it an estimated delivery time, but they didn't.

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.

I suppose discovery, or even a study of whether the delivery countdown matters to actual delivery, in a case like this is enough to categorize it as a dark pattern. If it can be shown to not matter to actual delivery time, what other purpose does it serve?

Polish official release linked in TFA (https://uokik.gov.pl/31-mln-zl-kary-dla-amazon) hints that the problem with that clock was, it wasn't actually a guarantee, because Amazon could have just cancelled the order. That it can just cancel the order based on some technicality (how Amazon defined conclusion of contract) is also illegal in itself.

If you, like me, only go to Amazon when you've already decided to buy a certain thing, then you probably just stay with the "will arrive tomorrow" part.

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".

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