Is Shopper Deception Worse Online Than Offline?

A recent survey found 72% of Australian consumers encountering “a potentially unfair practice” from an online retail marketplace in the previous 12 months, such as hidden charges, accidental clicks, or accidental subscriptions.

The survey of over 3,000 Australians aged 14 and older acted as part of Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) five-year investigation designed to better understand consumer’s experiences using online retail marketplaces — such as U.S. sites Amazon and eBay, China’s Shein and Temu, and Australia’s Kogan.

The research broke the potential infractions into five offense areas:

• Marketing e-mails: 42% received marketing-mails after their purchase or visit reminding them about things they didn’t purchase/left in their shopping cart; 23% received marketing emails they never knowingly signed up for, or felt ‘tricked’ into receiving.
• Forced sign-up: 16% were required to sign up for marketing communications in order to complete a purchase; 8% were required to sign up for a paid subscription in order to complete a purchase.
• Repeated reminders: 19% received repeated reminders to purchase addition service at checkout (such as a paid subscription or insurance); 18% received related reminders for sign up for additional marketing e-mails at checkout.
• Accidental subscriptions: 10% accidentally signed up for a paid subscription due to the way the option was worded.
• Accidental clicks: 20% clicked on a product or service in search results that they didn’t realize was an advertisement.
• Hidden charges: 21% discovered fees or charges at the checkout that weren’t disclosed beforehand (including delivery fees).

The ACCC concluded that its research “reinforces the need for regulatory reform to address digital platform-related competition and consumer harms, and an economy-wide prohibition on unfair trading practices.”

US Researchers Found Similar Evidence of ‘Dark Patterns’ in Online Retail Which May Persist Today

University of Chicago and Princeton researchers in 2019 found “dark patterns,” a term for deceptive online retail strategies, which appeared in more than 10% of e-commerce sites and were used frequently by many of the most popular online merchants.

The “familiar tricks” cited included:

• Countdown timers for “limited-time” sales that reset every time the user reloaded the page.
• Faked customer testimonials.
• Low-stock or high-demand notifications that appear on a recurring schedule.
• Messages or layouts that pressure consumers to buy higher-cost items.
• “Confirmshaming,” or when a pop-up uses manipulative language such as “No thanks, I don’t want to take advantage of this incredible offer” to lead users away from declining a purchase.
• Social proof, marked by messages such as “97 other users are viewing this item.”

The researchers wrote, “Many of these manipulative retail strategies have existed since long before the internet—think of the store with the never-ending ‘Going Out of Business’ sale, or the Columbia House ‘8 Albums for a Penny’ deal.”

But online shopping has pushed these “shady practices into overdrive,” per the researchers, deploying them in “newly powerful and sneaky ways.”