These terms are getting a bit out of hand XD
I’d wager that many of the dark patterns persist because Amazon use them, making their justification inside smaller companies easier.
I dont have prime and the whole UI is set up to trick me into getting prime.
I always buy enough to get free shipping (which they show with a big banner), but it always defaults to paid shipping, that often needs to be removed item by item.
More often than not, books I search for default to kindle, and I have actually been tricked into buying a kindle version before.
They hide the fact that you are buying from a reseller as much as they can.
I could go on, but the point is I agree with you entirely.
Amazon Prime on the other hand is definitely a dark pattern.
Amazon is incredibly good at converting consumer surveillance data in to money. They could easily default this (and many other things) to sensible per-user values. Given their competence and attention to detail, the reasonable guess here is that playing dumb on this default pays better than doing right by the user.
At this point you couldn't switch back.
Back when I was still in college they offered a "6 month trial" of Prime Student. I agreed, made a mental note to cancel it in 5 months, and was shocked to find the next day that my card had been charged. There weren't any purchase screens, any terms to agree to, or anything to indicate that the trial they were peddling was in fact just an ordinary Prime Student subscription which would then renew in 6 months.
I mean, it says Sold by X and Fulfilled by Amazon right under the add to basket/buy buttons. It's repeated on the order summary. I'm aware people keep missing this, but I don't really get it.
Why is this not obvious to us? It wasn't to me either. There has got to be some cognitive bias at play here to lead to our acceptance of inverted principles like this. The framing of the problem is completely inverted, yet we're pretty much okay with that.
If it's not clear what I'm talking about here's another example:
"Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?"
This is also a reframing that presumes I do not have privacy and therefore bare the burden to prove I need it. People accept this frame and attempt to argue it directly all the time, when they should really just say "Why do you need to take it?" The burden of proof is on the taker.
Neither the buyer nor the seller should be so accepting of Amazon's attempt to obfuscate the actual parties involved in the sale. Amazon is just the payment processor and possibly providing storage and shipping services.
A real world analogy would be if every store that accepts VISA looked like a VISA store.
You are buying this from X. Amazon is only processing the payment.
And there's probably a way to word that even more clearly...
This can't really be something Amazon is intentionally trying to trick you into doing. There's no way for you not to notice that it happened, and you can just return the kindle book.
In general you just need to change it for each shipment - if multiple items are grouped together [because they're all at the same warehouse) then changing one shipment will change the shipping speed of all items within it. They probably should be defaulting to free shipping when it's available, though.
I'm definitely overestimating my own ability to avoid Amazon's scammy tactics. I, like most people, am reluctant to admit that I'm vulnerable to manipulation by things like these dark patterns (and ads, PR, etc.). But since I'm talking about my subjective feelings towards the websites, I think how good I _feel_ I am is relevant.
I totally agree with everything you've said, but just want to clarify my initial comment. I'm not trying to let Amazon off the hook, though they are less problematic than almost all of the other examples in the article.
They walk the line between selling to customers and selling customers.
Over time, there are more and more "sponsored" results occluding and confusing my search results.
There are now warranty upsell screens on just about every purchase ("would you like coverage on your $5 part?")
They don't offer you the lowest cost on an item, you really have to drill down into all the offers to check.
If you block part of their site, things don't work - but if you sign in, all is well.
Can you delete your browsing history? Well, no. You can "hide" your browsing history but "removing items from view".
Search results are peppered with nonsensical results - that you searched for/bought before. I'm pretty sure this is timed with memory decay.
for example if 3 months ago you searched for dishes. Today when you search for computer parts, there might be a dish thrown into the results.
They talk about "free shipping" everywhere, but even if your cart is $500, you are opted-into non-free shipping and must manually select free shipping.
They don't tell you what is being sent in their shipping emails. But you can install their browser plugin and get all the info conveniently.
I think this was introduced in response to google scraping the data from your gmail. But I'll also add to the list of darkness:
Different prices on Alexa VS actually checking the site.
On Alexa, massively prioritising their own brands VS others. (check out Scott Galloway's tests)
They're also a case study on darkpatterns.org for how difficult it is to cancel.
I want to support the local economy, so unless an item is only available on Amazon, I try to avoid buying from them. I've ordered from lots of different online stores in the past few years, and in my experience these dark patters are pretty rare.
Honestly, of the top-x tech companies, Amazon is probably one of the easiest to quit, perhaps after Netflix.
ETA: And oh yeah. Books? Once again, search on shopping.google.com and buy from some small vendor.
Is there any evidence that e-commerce sites were any less scummy before Amazon started competing?
It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.
It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.
You are better at online shopping than I am.
Amazon has tricked me into signing up for Prime twice. First time it was disguised as a shipping option. The second time I'm not sure exactly how they did it.
Well, unsubscribing Amazon videos is a dark pattern too. Not as bad as Adobe, but still.
If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...
I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.