Bizarre. Poland isn’t a big market with Amazon, we have our own local monopoly in this sector called Allegro.
edit: ok this is done by UOKiK, a consumer protection agency. This agency has supposedly been doing a stellar job keeping an eye on everything from banking to e-commerce sector.
+1. When in Poland I use Allegro all the time - way more reliable than Amazon.pl. Not as good as Amazon in the states though.
My friends who moved back from the Bay Area still prefer to use Amazon, but they use Amazon.de instead - similar shipping times, and much better selection and reliability.
Not sure if this is still the case, but Amazon.de used to use fulfillment centers in Poland to deliver to Germany. So if you're in Poland and ordering from Amazon.de, your order could very well be delivered from Poland to Poland.
In fact there were 3 massive Amazon fullfilment centres in Poland before Amazon.pl even launched lol. It's a weird(but very interesting) market with its own big players that neither Amazon nor ebay managed to compete against.
I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro. I am happy about it, but also baffled. Allegro's customer experience is just stellar, whereas Amazon's interface continues to give the impression that it's still a bunch of widgets rendered by a hundred microservices and glued together without any elegant cohesion in mind. It's as if little has changed since the famous Steve Yegge's letter.
It's even more baffling that Amazon.pl has one of the worst customer support I've ever seen while Amazon.de is a total opposite - an increadibly pleasant experience and packages almost always arrive on the next day.
I'm no fan of either - Allegro has Amazon executives and nearly identical Prime-free shipping strategy. Pretty sure Allegro has the same effect of monopolizing and driving up prices as Amazon has.
I find the eBay-esque artifact interface absurd. It's likely Amazon hasn't found a way because an environment that isn't a monopoly isn't attractive to begin with for that business model.
I think Allegro lowers prices because it forces sellers into common arena where they have no choice but to compete with each other. It's usually cheaper to buy stuff on Allegro than on dedicated e-commerce site.
But think about it - when was the last time you actually got a good comparison in this market between allegro and a dedicated e-commerce site? For many product categories the latter almost doesn't even exist anymore.
Maybe tipping point is ahead of us. But Allegro already has 20mln unique users monthly (in a country of 36mln people) and twice as many as next largest, AliExpress.
Allegro has amazing metadata allowing you to precisely filter out the results. Search experience on amazon is an utter abomination compared to Allegro.
> I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro.
If Amazon is being treated just like all the other companies, and protection agencies are doing their job, then they wouldn't be able to use their neo-colonial business model.
See: what Amazon itself has done in the Middle East among Uber, Delivery Hero, and all the other Big Companies With More Capital have done to dominate these markets. It can't work if the governmental watchdogs like market and/or consumer authorities are able to block them.
I'm not sure enough to know if that's sarcastic, but the circumstances make me wonder if this was to promote local competitors or score political points.
UOKiK is pretty well known for doing a great job. I had some money returned from my ISP because of UOKiK. I saw big red banners on websites basically saying that they have to apologise for ripping off their customers because UOKiK is holding them by the balls. I had my refunds rejected but then approved immediately after mentioning UOKiK.
No no, I'm serious. I have friends in banking who had experiences coming under UOKiK scrutiny and they claim that it really has it's shit together. I have no doubt that there is dysfunction in the system, just not when it comes to regulation of this sector apparently.
The part about the countdown clock for delivery dates is interesting.
Amazon is not in my country, but Amazon DE does ship here for not too much. It's often cheaper and sometimes even quicker to order from Amazon DE than a local e-retailer (they often don't have items in stock locally, and need to ship from a warehouse in another country).
I wanted to purchase some items, and it gave the usual "order in the next 8 hours for delivery on Sunday". I wanted to add some other items later, and forgot about it. I finally got around to placing the order two days later. It gave me a delivery date of... the same Sunday.
I've never had any issues with the countdown clock; it's usually for orders that I want to receive quickly, and it tells me "if you order within the next 2 hours, it will arrive tomorrow". So, I doubt that it's a dark pattern (at least in Italy). Then again, if third-party sellers are using this system as a dark pattern, that's a different matter.
Judging by the parent comment, the dark part is the fact that it might be fake pressure. As in - it's true that it will arrive tomorrow if you order within the next 2 hrs, but it will actually arrive tomorrow even if you take 4 hrs.
Isn’t the explanation just that delivery estimates have a wide margin of error? To guarantee delivery by a target date the order must be placed by the beginning of the margin, but if you order within the margin there’s some probability of getting that date by chance.
To explain the two estimates days apart both returning the same Sunday, consider that the week is heterogeneous; maybe some regional hop is available specifically on Saturday regardless of how early you order.
Sure, but the regulator in this case is making an argument that it's creating an unfair pressure to make you purchase a thing, and that the timer is consistently shorter than it needs to be.
It's the same thing as going on a website and it says "order within next 30 minutes for a 50% discount" and then you come back an hour later and it still says the same thing - it creates an incentive on you to purchase by creating an illusion of urgency. It's the illusion part that the regulators have a problem with.
The dark pattern is actually the opposite. People who ordered in the next 2 hours might not get it the next day. If you tell someone "buy it in the next 2 hours to receive it tomorrow", you better make sure they get it tomorrow.
I don't see how that is necessarily a dark pattern. It would be a dark pattern if they were saying that when they knew it would not make it in time.
But if most of the time they do make the deadline, and the times that they do not are caused by problems that arose unexpectedly after the order was places, it is not a dark pattern.
> and the times that they do not are caused by problems that arose unexpectedly after the order was places, it is not a dark pattern
I think the contention here is that they intentionally overcommitted. One would have to see the statistics on how often they miss the promised timeline.
Delivery date is part of the implied contract. They would be fine if they just called it an estimated delivery time, but they didn't.
Of course if there was a road closure or something like that then the consequences would be minimal, but it sounds like they caught Amazon systematically making promises it can't keep.
I mean usually the cut-off time is to "order by 8 PM to get the product delivered the next day". I'm not convinced that setting the order deadline at 8 PM instead of 10 PM significantly boosts sales. E-commerce platforms are full of dark patterns, but on Amazon (perhaps because I go there when I already know what I want to buy), I haven't noticed many. Another potential dark pattern is that the lowest price is shown for offers with Prime included, while sometimes there are lower prices available for the same product shipped without Prime. However, even in this case, I don't have any complaints. Not defending Amazon obviously, but since I pay for Prime, I definitely want the fastest shipment possible.
I suppose discovery, or even a study of whether the delivery countdown matters to actual delivery, in a case like this is enough to categorize it as a dark pattern. If it can be shown to not matter to actual delivery time, what other purpose does it serve?
Polish official release linked in TFA (https://uokik.gov.pl/31-mln-zl-kary-dla-amazon) hints that the problem with that clock was, it wasn't actually a guarantee, because Amazon could have just cancelled the order. That it can just cancel the order based on some technicality (how Amazon defined conclusion of contract) is also illegal in itself.
If you, like me, only go to Amazon when you've already decided to buy a certain thing, then you probably just stay with the "will arrive tomorrow" part.
However the countdown could add some pressure if you're still deciding on buying something or not, in the form of "now or never FOMO".
It doesn't strike me as particularly unusual for the clock to give one time, and then a different time later. A lot of factors might go into making promises and each time they're evaluated variables may be different.
I might give an ETA for some code, say 3 days, then do something else and find an easier way to do the task I was asked about earlier, dude to happenstance or even lower demands on my time ... so that later when asked again I might give an even even earlier ETA.
For Finland it seems they time their shipping by arrival date. So if arrival date is bit away, they only ship a few days later. But it will hit the arrival window.
Slightly unconnected but I’ve found a rather disturbing “dark pattern” in Amazon sales of food items in CA.
Background: CA requires a warning on food that has some threshold level of carcinogenic or harmful substance - esp lead and arsenic. It’s called CA 65 Warning or a Proposition 65 warning.
I make sure to look for these on the images of labels and ingredients when I buy food especially ground spices off Amazon.
The dark pattern: Label images show no CA 65 warning but when the food turns up it has such a warning! I bought bulk powdered cinnamon with this issue.
Recently I noticed that while Amazon does not show the warning on the label it has an innocuous small print link in your shopping cart that leads to the full text of the warning should you notice it and click on it
This is now in the vicinity of actually increasing the probability of physical harm. Because of not having the warning in the label AND having an almost ignorable warning at checkout when you are more focused on getting things done and move on to the next thing, as opposed to when you are in a more deliberative state while browsing.
Just want to put that out for folks in CA who might care about such things. I’m sure they wouldn’t try shtuff like this in EU.
My guess is that their product page (which serves the rest of the country too) doesn’t feature the label in it’s image because it’s not relevant to anyone outside of CA. Perhaps Oregon has it’s own version of CA 65 with a different warning label, but that wouldn’t be relevant to anyone outside of OR so it’s not prominent in the product page.
I suppose they could display regional versions of the product page based on geolocation, but that’s a huge layer of added complexity and they may not be legally required to alter their website to comply.
So I’d chalk it up to neglect or indifference, rather than a deliberate dark pattern.
It sounds like Amazon (in Poland at least) has been playing it fast and loose with "eventual consistency" but violated the law by basing legally binding claims on the unreliable data. Selling goods that are already out of stock only to then cancel the order later, or indicating a false time pressure to purchase in order to meet a delivery date, etc, all sound like they could as well be genuine mistakes. Amazon just happens to be too big for that to be a valid excuse.
Except they do still charge you first before figuring out they won't actually ship you the goods as promised. It is the charging and then not delivering that is the problem.
Nope, in Poland(and in UK as well) it charges you immediately, unless the item is specifically marked as pre-order(like new unreleased yet games and films - those get charged when they ship, everything else gets charged the moment of order). I've ordered a new router from Amazon few weeks ago, it was showing as "shipping 5th of April" (they were on backorder I guess) but they charged my card straight away.
It seems bizarre to hear about these problems in Poland. Amazon had all this stuff figured out a long time ago. Which is why I order from Amazon all the time - it works reliably, 99.99% of the time.
And they understand how to properly package things, which is what I would expect after they've shipped a billions packages over the past 25+ years. When I order from Target or Vitacost, there's a 25% chance that they throw things in a box, add a single inflated plastic bag, and ship it. Glass jars arrive smashed, shampoo bottles crack open and leak over the other items, etc. It's like day 1 for Amazon's competition in terms of packaging.
According to the gov investigator a big part of the "darkness" in this case were A's terms of service. They moved the moment of entering the legal sale agreement well after the customer could expect from their web interaction.
There's this fitness app called madmuscles https://madmuscles.com/ that takes dark patterns to the extreme. It has to be seen to be believed. I don't know how they get away with it
My personal experience was that I signed up for a monthly plan at a reduced price, so far so good. I immediately regretted my purchase because I realised I'd been taken in by their shiny ads and was basically paying for a shiny UX and nothing else as there is no credible health consultant behind it all. That's fine, most apps are probably like that in the health domain.
What is particularly terrible is when I went to cancel the plan they do not let you immediately cancel. Instead they ask you why you want to cancel and upsell you another more expensive plan based on your response. They provide no cancel button at any point, so there is no way to not accept. I refreshed the page and realised they had added a free month of a plan which would cost me close to 100 euros the next month. So not only was I unable to cancel my existing subscription, I would also have to pay more the following month. I somehow managed to cancel everything and get a refund, probably being in the EU helped, but in the link you can read the comments of those less fortunate.
Strange that Amazon would do this. The original selling point of their "one-click" system was that it had undo. Everybody else was requiring lots of confirmation, while Amazon was just click and go, with the opportunity to undo mistakes.
Amazon has lost that, with their "No, I don't want to buy Prime", "No, I really don't want to buy Prime", and "QUIT TRYING TO GET ME TO BUY YOUR PRIME SERVICE" check out system.
Don't know why you are getting downvoted. NYT and many publishers are notorious with their dark patterns to keep you around.
The only company that I know of that makes it easier to 'unsubscribe' than to 'subscribe' is netflix. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Didn't have to call them and have them guilt trip me into staying. Or chat with someone or some AI. Just cancel. Though they do email you deals from time to time. But even then only every few weeks or so.
Can Poland please fine the hell of Zoom, for the darkest pattern of pretending you need to install a client to join a meeting. And only after a few seconds, show at the end of the page you can join with a browser?
I used zoom in browser before using the apps.. and the annoying dark patterns basically pushed me to avoid zoom whenever I can at this point.
A lot of these kinds of dark patterns sacrifice long term user satisfaction and brand reputation for short-term gains in questionable internal metrics (metrics that are often tied to bonuses for people who couldn't care less about the long-term success of the company or its customers).
I do not understand why people think Zoom is so good, and why companies pay money to use it. The app is so annoying. (At least on MacOS) it splits everything into many different windows that end up on different screens and it's so annoying having to scan all my screens to find the piece of the UI that lets me start screen sharing. Whenever I join a Zoom meeting from the Calendar, it first pops open a browser tab, and then that opens the Zoom app. In the year 2024, why can't it open the Zoom app directly? Surely one app can start a process to run another app?
I suspect it's two factors. The first is that it's not produced by a major and statistically we like an underdog. The second is that they made a video client that actually worked when all the majors under invested and produced clients with serious issues. From there, the market is sticky. It has worn a bit though, hasn't it?
Zoom is terrible for this, but it's also sometimes the fault of the meeting organiser. There's a setting in the Zoom admin panel which allows admins to enable/disable the option of joining from the browser (or there used to be, at least).
If you don't see the join from browser link even after jumping through Zoom's dark pattern hoops, ask the meeting admin to enable it.
No, just tested it out (in the US). I honestly had no idea there was a web client at all because of the pattern OP is talking about.
When I clicked the zoom link it opens a browser window and pops up a system dialog to launch the zoom app. After I hit "cancel" on that dialog I was on a page with a large "Launch Meeting" button (and no link to use the web version). Then, I clicked the "Launch Meeting" button and it opened the same system dialog again. Then, after I clicked cancel on that dialog a small link appeared at the bottom that says: "Having issues with Zoom Client? Join from Your Browser"
That’s so interesting, I’ve known about it from the very beginning of my introduction to zoom, back at the start of the pandemic when zoom was becoming ubiquitous someone released a chrome extension to always use the web client.
What if you open it in incognito mode? I haven't had to use Zoom for a while, but last time I did, it would automatically download an exe/pkg when opening the page.
PSA: just click the “open in app” link (which won’t do anything since you don’t have the app installed) and the “actually open in browser” link will immediately appear.
Hmm, I mean I hate patterns like this but also there are like a million apps out there that don't have a web client at all (not to mention the ones that do support web but constantly display popups saying "x is better in the app"), so it would seem odd to punish Zoom for this while letting all those other companies carry on.
I enjoy the fine print which says, "your subscription price can change".
Which of course it does. There is a lot of price fuckery going on, where they lower it to drive subscriptions and then raise the price above the average price.
I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted, because subscribe & save is obviously a dark pattern along the lines of "entice subscription, get people to forget about it" only with variable pricing on top of it.
edit: ok this is done by UOKiK, a consumer protection agency. This agency has supposedly been doing a stellar job keeping an eye on everything from banking to e-commerce sector.