South Africa is in the grip of Black Friday fever as retailers and shoppers are preparing themselves for a scrum that would put the Springboks best efforts to shame. It may be a concept that came from the US, but South Africans have adopted it as their own and the retailers are rubbing their palms in anticipation of the cash that is going to flow in. Some like Makro are even offering Uber discounts to shoppers. The Police have warned that danger could be lurking in the day as thieves are out and about as well, and have asked shoppers to take care of their children. But are the goods advertised as massive discounts really such a bargain? Studies in both the United States and the United Kingdom have found that the best deals are actually not on Black Friday. Which? a consumer group in the UK found that only 4 of 83 products they studied were cheaper during the Black Friday promotion, that is less than 5%. The advice that Which? has, that could be valuable for South African shoppers, is that you should not buy on impulse; look at the prices from previous days. If there is a big ticket item that  you want to buy like a television or a computer, study the prices beforehand to make sure you are buying a bargain. Jo Craven McGinty writes in the Wall Street Journal how shopping websites use “dark patterns to exploit online shoppers’ emotions, insecurities and biases.” That last one available whether online or lying in the basket before you could unleash your inner competitive demon and you may actually be paying more than you should. – Linda van Tilburg

Tricks online retailers use to get you to spend more

By Jo Craven McGinty

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(The Wall Street Journal) – Millions of shoppers are expected to take advantage of online bargains over the Thanksgiving holiday – but buyer beware. Many e-commerce purchases are pushed by misleading tactics designed to get consumers to buy goods they otherwise wouldn’t.

Among the ploys are limited-time offers that never truly end, fake notifications that suggest a product is nearly sold-out and timers that urge shoppers to complete a purchase before the selection expires.

The machinations, which could affect as many as 68.7 million consumers on Cyber Monday, raise the question: Are you a shopper or a mark?

To measure the prevalence of the strategies, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago examined 53,000 product pages from 11,000 shopping websites and found that 11% used what are known as “dark patterns” to exploit online shoppers’ emotions, insecurities and biases.

“They’re trying to get you to make a decision they want,” said Marshini Chetty, who teaches computer science at the University of Chicago and is a co-author of the study. “Most of the stuff is counting on the user making an emotional decision.”

In some cases, the notifications may be authentic. But the researchers documented instances when limited-stock counts were created by random-number generators; countdown timers restarted when a webpage was refreshed; and high-demand messages appeared for every item in a cart.

“The goal of these patterns in the shopping context is to get you to buy more things,” said Arunesh Mathur, a graduate student at Princeton and lead author of the study. “Once you know about them, you see them everywhere.”

While the researchers chose to examine shopping websites, they could have looked at travel websites, mobile-phone apps or a variety of other sources.

“It’s not specific to any type of website or app,” Dr. Chetty said. “Any time there is a user interface, it can try to mislead you to some gain for the service provider.”

The term “dark pattern” was coined in 2010 by Harry Brignull, a cognitive scientist who specializes in product design, user experience and user research. Since then, he and others have collected anecdotal evidence of the practices, but the Princeton and University of Chicago researchers have documented the extent to which it occurs.

The researchers designed a web crawler to systematically visit popular shopping websites, which they identified using a platform that categorises and ranks the sites based on user traffic.

The crawler only evaluated text messages – ignoring font sizes, colours or other devices that might also influence shoppers – and it only visited product, cart and checkout pages, meaning it would have missed dark patterns appearing elsewhere on the sites.

The researchers found an online consignment and thrift store that generated messages based on fictitious names and locations for an unchanging list of products that was always indicated to be “just sold.” They found a specialty-bedding retailer that published the same discount prices for most products from day to day while also displaying a countdown timer indicating the “flash sale” would end in a few hours.

They also documented sites that surreptitiously added items to carts, published identical testimonials attributed to different customers and “confirm shamed” shoppers with messages such as “No thanks, I hate saving money” or “No thanks, I hate fun & games.”

While the tactics ranged from subtle to heavy-handed, separate research has suggested the strategies are effective.

As a test, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and Jamie Luguri, a student there at the time, administered an online survey to a nationally representative sample of 1,963 adults who were recruited by a professional research firm.

Participants thought the survey was intended to evaluate their attitudes about privacy. But at the end, they were led to believe they had been signed up for a costly identity-theft protection service. When given the opportunity to opt out, some were exposed to dark patterns varying in intensity from mild to aggressive, while a control group was not.

The researchers found that mild dark patterns more than doubled the percentage of consumers who signed up for the bogus identity-theft protection service, compared with the control group, while aggressive dark patterns nearly quadrupled the percentage.

Earlier this year, Sens. Mark Warner (D., Va.) and Deb Fischer (R., Neb.) introduced the Deceptive Experiences to Online Users Reduction Act to ban large online platforms from using dark patterns.

But for now, here’s the bottom line.

If you find that shopping websites are pushing your buttons, think twice before you push theirs.

Write to Jo Craven McGinty at [email protected].