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Comment by Padding | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this basically what Amazon does? I've always felt very comfortable and safe when pushing the buy button on their site.

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No they don't:

* Can't get shipping charges before the last step (after selecting the credit card which implies I am about to pay)

* Sneaking in Prime

* Fucked up search

Nobody can give you shipping charges without knowing your address. The credit card step exists because most of the time the billing address and shipping address are the same.

I've been their customer for ages, surely they could've worked it out.

It depends on what shipping address you use though. An online vendor could probably be sued for false advertising if they showed one shipping price, but then changed it later because a customer decided to use a new shipping address.

It depends really. Amazon.com, no of cause not, the US is huge for small countries, you do know the shipping cost.

I work for a company that has seven webshops, in six countries. We work out how much it will be to ship an item, on average and just include it in the price of the product. If the customer orders multiple item, we save a bit of money on shipping for that order. So in our case, because one webshop only shipping within one country, we always have a shipping cost of zero (it no zero of cause, it's factored into the product price, but it easier to figure out the actual cost of a purchase ).

I have a few addresses in my amazon account, and post to one 99% of the time. It shouldn't take a genius to figure that out.

And misquote to you 1% of the time? That would open them up to a fraud claim 1% of the time.

Billing address won't change the shipping address.

And if I'm sending a gift to an address that isn't already in my account?

Ship cost estimates are far more difficult than just making an assumption about where it will be shipped to. You just flat out can't quote a shipping cost unless you know for sure what the address is, or else the act of quoting shipping can actually be considered fraudulent. They get the delivery address at the same stage as the payment information because it allows for an easy "Shipping address is same as billing address" option.

For anyone that is too skeptical about entering payment information before seeing shipping costs, there is an option to estimate your shipping costs beforehand. It requires more work though, which is why it is an optional step.

Hmm, I am paying here on amazon.de with direct bank transfer, and it shows shipping costs even directly on the article page as long as I'm logged in.

Why is that?

Denmark is much smaller than USA, so the shipping cost doesn't depend much (or any) on your actual address/postal code.

I agree with the f*ed up search comment, assuming you mean they sort by how it affects their bottom line.

But if that's the worst of their 'dark patterns', then the experience of shopping on their website is one of the better ones.

The first I agree with, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Sneaking in Prime".

"Fucked up search" is almost certainly not deliberate. I suspect it costs them a good deal of sales when people cannot find what they wanted to purchase. I don't think you can call that an 'dark pattern' unless it is deliberate and they are working some sort of angle.

It means they try to trick you into joining Prime, every time you make a purchase.

Case in point:

Yesterday my wife made a small purchase on Amazon. In the evening, I was checking our shared credit card statement and noticed that there were two charges from Amazon. One was for the amount of her purchase. The other was for $1.00 and said "Amazon Prime".

I went to my wife and asked her, "Did you mean to sign up for Amazon Prime?"

Her reply: "What is Amazon Prime?"

We then had to go into her Amazon account and manually cancel a service we didn't want that would have silently billed us $99 in 30 days.

Now, you could say, that perhaps my wife did not clearly read every word of every screen that was presented to her during the checkout process. But shouldn't it have been obvious? My wife literally had no idea she signed up for something that costs $99, by accident, all while making an $11 purchase.

I don't think it's possible to argue that this is an accident. Amazon clearly knows what they are doing, and it is by design.

I don't know what GP meant, but maybe Amazon is aiming for a spot where it's easy to find something that fits the bill, but hard to find the cheapest thing that fits the bill. That's generally been my experience with their search, anyway.

Exactly.

Also they tend to search for synonyms, which sometimes returns ridiculous amount of results.

For the shipping charges, it used to be like you say, but since some time now, if I go to the basket, a little below the "Proceed to Checkout" button there is an "Estimate VAT, Postage and Packaging" option.

Nice one, did not know that. Thank you.

What is also confusing "Dispatch to this address" button. Am I going to pay now with no return? When do I get the actual price?

also defaults to non-free shipping at least some times...

I wonder why they purposely fuck up the search... is it to prioritize shipped from amazon products (sort by new and popular is one example)?

Here's my Amazon challenge: Find a phone charger on Amazon that:

* Isn't one of Amazon's own * Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded

Amazon is completely happy selling poor quality or even counterfeit goods, phone chargers are a particularly bad area of the site but others exist as well. There is no way Amazon could claim ignorance of this - there are 100s of reviews on some products such as "Samsung" chargers saying they are fake. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than 1) complying with British law when it comes to product descriptions 2) complying with EU safety laws 3) the safety of their customers.

Can you even begin to imagine what hell it would cause Amazon, at their scale, to be burdened with policing that? It would require a whole building full of Amazon compliance officers who won't always get it right - and when they don't they'd be liable which would cost more even more money and create ill feeling between Amazon and its customers as they'd be making assurances that they could not possibly keep (the story of every consumer protection law ever, btw.)

Seems to me the review system - by your account, not mine - is working just as intended.

Well, they are obliged by law to make sure whatever they are selling is not counterfeit and is safe to use. And no, the law does not care how that is enforced - but I imagine that when they order a batch of chargers from China, someone could take a look at one and see if it's genuine or not?

What is the burden on every smaller shop that operates in this country and manages to obey these laws? Without Amazon's economies of scale, it costs them far more per item than it would Amazon. Just because the absolute cost to Amazon would be huge doesn't make it unfair as they have a lot more money total, in fact it's completely unfair that only smaller companies have to deal with this.

If it genuinely isn't possible for Amazon to sell chargers and obey the law, then they should stop selling chargers. No-one's making them do it.

> Doesn't have a single review saying it caught fire or exploded

Well, it is a case of every mass-produced good that if it has 0.001% of catastrophic failure, and a million of people will buy it, it will explode in the hands of ten of them, and maybe one will get and write that review. The others probably won't bother writing 999990 reviews saying "it worked as intended".

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