The Subtle Tricks Shopping Sites Use to Make You Spend More

Back in April, when much of the United States was still sheltering in place, Amazon made an extraordinary decision. Last year, researchers from Princeton University and the University of Chicago published a study looking at roughly 11,000 shopping sites, and found dark patterns on more than 11 percent of them, including major retailers like Fashion Nova and J.C. Penney. “Design and behavioral science have become weaponized to solely benefit online retailers and to exploit users.” For their study, Mathur and his coauthors developed a bot that scanned thousands of shopping sites looking for text-based dark patterns, which they organized into 15 different types. Hundreds of the websites the researchers looked at used activity notifications, alerting visitors that “Sally just bought this dress,” or “35 people are looking at this item right now.” They found that on some sites, the messages were artificially fabricated—merely lines of code, not indications of real consumers buying things. Even worse, on 16 websites they looked at, the researchers found that the stated stock numbers were entirely fake, and decreased in a “recurring deterministic pattern according to a schedule.” Many retail websites exploit scarcity bias by using countdown timers, which indicate that a sale or special offer will expire after a certain amount of time.