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Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

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Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#11

Post by flycatcha »

autoexec wrote: post #8

My guess is that either DoorDash doesn't want to invest in preventing what is basically fraud on their platform or they've discovered that they actually make more money if they enable it and let it continue no matter how terrible the experience is for the people who order food. Uninstall DoorDash and the problem goes away for you, and if enough people uninstall DoorDash the math changes and the problem goes away for…

Totally, I imagine they incentivize / encourage bad restaurants to appear as ghost kitchen brands on their platform, and to algorithmically inflate reviews so that most averages appear to be over 4.0.

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#12

Post by downboots »

jmole wrote: post #9

My favorite pattern from doordash: Browsing for a restaurant - delivery time 20-30 minutes Adding food to the cart - delivery time 25-35 minutes Checkout - delivery time 30-40 minutes Payment processed - delivery time 45-55 minutes

linking to relevant terms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

Seems established and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Regulation_a...

May be a case for this imo ianal

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#13

Post by pipeline_peak »

I like the idea of forking over half a million to live in some Bay Area crawl space and just listen to people like OP complain about ghost kitchens and refusing to Google restaurant reviews. The reviews already exist, how is providing even more in DoorDash’s interest?

“Let’s use UberEats instead, DoorDash doesn’t have reviews”.

If you don’t know what it is, either go by car or don’t order it.

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#15

Post by stephenboyd »

The worst ghost kitchen I've seen is for an exclusively gluten-free pizza place in Seattle. That's an appealing prospect if you have a serious celiac case and you can't eat food that's made in a typical pizza place where flour gets everywhere in the process. I looked up the address and it's actually a typical pasta and pizza Italian place with gluten in most items.

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#16

Post by spike021 »

woutr_be wrote: post #5

One of the absolute worst dark patterns I’ve seen was on Foodpanda. When you’re just browsing, you see prices crossed out, with a cheaper price below it, which seems to indicate there’s some sort of promotion. You can continue browsing a specific restaurant, and order a “discounted” item, your total price will be the sum of the discounted items. That is, up until you actually want to check out, suddenly your total ju…

I've had kind of similar things before with DoorDash or UberEats. They'll show I have a discount or some amount off ($5 usually), and then only once I'm ready to actually submit my order the full fine print shows up that I needed to have a subtotal of $30, $40, or whatever. Maybe that's fine for a family but for one person it stinks to think "oh cool I've got a discount" and I waste my time thumbing through restaurants and putting together an order only for it to not be worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#17

Post by gricardo99 »

What about the hidden service fee? They gladly tell you the delivery fee is only $5 (or free!) but it’s not until you’ve fully ordered and paid that you see the itemized service fee that can be greater than 25%.

But at least they tell you how much you paid for the service. The worst for price transparency is “same day” costco delivery by Instacart. They markup the prices but never tell you how much more you’re paying for their service, it’s completely hidden unless the shopper/driver accidentally leaves you with the costco warehouse receipt. Once I saw the 35% markup on a nominal $300 order, I never used same-day costco again. I knew I was paying some markup for the service (they tell you on the website that prices are higher than in the warehouse), but I could not justify that much.

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#18

Post by pipeline_peak »

gricardo99 wrote: post #17

What about the hidden service fee? They gladly tell you the delivery fee is only $5 (or free!) but it’s not until you’ve fully ordered and paid that you see the itemized service fee that can be greater than 25%. But at least they tell you how much you paid for the service. The worst for price transparency is “same day” costco delivery by Instacart. They markup the prices but never tell you how much more you’re paying…

Even with membership, I’ve never paid less than $300 on Costco Instacart.

It’s a total joke, the whole point of wholesale is to save money.

I’m far too lazy to do the math, but I think I save more money Instacart shopping Aldi than Costco

Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

#19

Post by nharada »

Yes! I thought I was crazy!

The most annoying thing for me is constantly getting notifications for "discount codes" that don't actually work. When I've contacted support they tell me "they're expired" or "it was a bug in the app" and they offer me a much worse version of the coupon.

If it's a bug, they've had it for months, and it conveniently is very beneficial to their engagement numbers (you enter the app, make an order, and settle for a tiny discount when the deal doesn't work).

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