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How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

nytimes.com

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Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#61

Post by RandomInteger4 »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #58
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #52

There goes that nasty evil capitalism, "It wasn't my lack of will power and cognitive short falls that caused me to buy these things ... it was capitalism's fault. I'm completely innocent and would never make bad decisions of my own accord ..."

That is somewhat unfair. Most of the time, it’s a naive consumer on one side, and an army of UI experts and behavioral scientists on the other. That consumer is hopelessly outmatched, and the company will absolutely find a way to hack his or her psychology.

Citing human psychology is a sad excuse to excuse one's self from personal responsibility. You are the final arbiter of all decisions that you make. Nobody else. You are the one that is ultimately responsible.

If this were loot boxes, then maybe we'd be having a different discussion, but unless they're tricking you into something other than what is advertised, then the onus ultimately falls upon you to control your desire to purchase something.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#64

Post by jancsika »

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #52

There goes that nasty evil capitalism, "It wasn't my lack of will power and cognitive short falls that caused me to buy these things ... it was capitalism's fault. I'm completely innocent and would never make bad decisions of my own accord ..."

There goes that nasty evil legacy language, "It wasn't my lack of programming skills and cognitive short falls that caused an exploit in internet-critical software ... it was C's lack of memory safety. I'm completely innocent and would never make bad decisions of my own accord ..."

And ask yourself-- who benefits the most from the borrow checker? Because it's sure not John Q. Programmer ...

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#65

Post by cabaalis »

The FTC regulates advertisements. [1] At what point is a statement like "[x] just saved $[y]!" on your own site being shown to a visitor constitute an advertisement for your service? Or is it just advertisements involving a paid third party?

From 1: "Advertisements with specific claims can be substantiated with evidence"

[1] https://bondstreet.com/truth-in-advertising-laws/

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#66

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

3xblah wrote: post #4

"The report coincides with discussions among lawmakers about regulating technology companies, including through a bill proposed in April by Senators Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that is meant to limit the use of dark patterns by making some of the techniques illegal and giving the Federal Trade Commission more authority to police the practice. "We are focused in on a pro…

We have a ton of laws on the books to regulate companies.

The thing is, we are in regulatory capture. The only time they get enforced is when the government wants a share of the profits (with fines that are At this point, I care about enforcement mechanisms... not more paper. We need to see CEOs behind bars if we want things to change.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#67

Post by lotsofpulp »

mcv wrote: post #56
lotsofpulp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market does not pay for anything. Individual buyers pay for things, and individual buyers and sellers determine the value of items, at a certain place, at a certain time. Most everyday items are sold “one size fits all” (but not in large quantities) in developed countries (since the seller's time is valuable enough to offset the extra revenue (or loss) from price discrimination), but there are quite a few places…

Do we really need to deconstruct all of economics here? The market consists of those individual buyers and sellers. But they set the value together. No single buyer can set the value of the items they want to buy in the supermarket. They buy them or they don't buy them. In response to that, the seller adjusts the price. If not enough people buy it, the seller lowers the price, if he runs out too fast, he raises the p…

>So if a potential buyer sees something 70% discounted, that implies that originally, the market determined that higher price as a fair price: a price that at least some buyers would pay for this item. The buyer trusts the market that that is apparently a fair price, but today the buyer is in luck, because it's been discounted to below the usual market price!

This whole paragraph is wrong in my opinion. A 70% discount does NOT imply anything other than it's 70% off of some number that the seller is free to decide, since they own the product they are selling and I'm not aware of any laws dictating what they have to sell at.

The second part I don't agree with is a seller selling at "below" market price. There is no such thing, unless the seller is doing charity work. When a sale happens, that is at the market price, unless of course there is some collusion where the buyer and seller agree to do some other trade-off to avoid paying taxes, but that's neither here nor there in this conversation.

On popular sale days, such as Black Friday, the sellers aren't selling below market price. They are selling at the price that they think they need to in order to get the publicity/feet in the door that they think will lead to other sales. In effect, the seller is buying the buyer's time and attention and whatever probability the buyer has of spending more money on other things with the "discount" they offered.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#68

Post by asark »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #38
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d rather see education in schools teaching people that discounts are sales tactics that should be ignored "I'd rather see education in schools teaching people that $instances-of-abuse are members of $family-of-methods-of-abuse that one should protect themselves against". Funny how for almost everything else, the abuse itself is considered both illegal and morally repugnant, yet abusive sales tactics are legally a…

Where is the abuse? A seller has the right to sell at whatever price they want (assuming non emergency situations). If I'm a seller, I can raise the price 100% at 10AM, and then put a sign that says 70% off. And then the next day, I can reduce the price 100%. The very use of ambiguous wording is a signal that it's a sales tactic. No one advertises 50% off the median average sale price in the past 30 days, because the…

> Booking.com claiming so and so is selling out quickly! What is quickly defined as?

Look, be whoever you want, but own it, don't hide behind equivocation. No one else is buying (haha) any of this. The only person you're working to convince here is yourself.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#69

Post by reroute1 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #30
vmurthy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume that the price of an item is $100 today ($200 original price - so a 50% discount). A week from now is Black Friday. The retailer has said 70% off on all goods. Now if the retailer increases the price to $333.33 (100/(1-0.7)) and then discounts it by 70% to give a final selling price of $100, wouldn't you feel cheated? I know I would.

The words original price mean nothing to me, as it should to everyone. I ignore discounts too, I only care about how much money is coming out of my pocket for what I'm paying for, and what my alternatives are. I lie about discounts all the time, all salespeople have to. Buying a house, car, land, businesses, etc. People in poorer countries where bartering is common do it for everyday items too like fruits and vegetab…

But this is placing a giant burden on the consumer to do legal level language analysis of a sales pitch. That's not going to happen, so that kind of language is taking advantage of the average person since they aren't going to do that. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not shady and dirty. Your bartering example is a bit out of context, that's not as obvious as a dark pattern or blatantly misleading via pricing and sales.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#70

Post by reroute1 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #51
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are way overcomplicating it. People are not talking about comparing the discounted price with some fictional “intrinsic utility” price and your comments about the utility of the item are tone deaf and missing the point. Advertising that you are selling something at a discount is information that your price might be lower than a competitor. Nobody likes getting a discount at store A then seeing the same item for l…

I think expecting a seller to make sure they have the lowest price compared to other sellers is ridiculous. It’s not a seller’s job to make sure the buyer is getting the lowest price. It’s not possible for a seller to know every single other seller’s price so I don’t see how anyone has a reasonable expectation to that in the first place. People like to THINK they are getting a discount. They don’t care that the actua…

People care more about feeling like they save money vs. actually saving money?

If they found out they were just given the illusion of saving money vs. actually saving money who would choose the illusion? I sure as hell wouldn't it seems totally illogical.

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