21 Dark Patterns I’ve Seen in Online Shopping

Like many others, I've been shopping online for well over a decade.

During this time, I've directly or indirectly encountered many unethical behavioural patterns used to influence our purchase decisions and get us to spend more than we originally intended.

While we can't do much about these practices when buying online, knowing what they are and how they influence us can help us avoid falling into these well-laid traps.

So, here are 21 such dark patterns that I've seen used across the Internet:

1. Fake offer countdowns. You've probably seen this. No matter when you open an app page or an e-commerce site, they're always running a discount offer that'll end in the next 7 hours. This fake urgency often makes us pull the trigger on a purchase when we're still on the fence about the product.
2. Artificial demand spiking. Many ecommerce sites, such as Etsy, often show a prominent callout like “6 people have this in their basket” beside a product listing to entice you to act quickly or risk losing the piece. However, even if you return to this listing a day later, you'll likely still find it available.
3. Unlikely discount offers. E-commerce or food delivery sites often advertise significant discounts in a promotional banner. But when you try to buy a product you like, you'll find it's ineligible for the discount. Only a few select products are. By this time you're probably hungry or desperately want the item, so you're likely to buy without a discount or at a smaller one.
4. Misleading price framing. This is rare, but I've seen websites advertise a low price without an upfront message about it being an annual commitment. Envato Elements is one such example. They advertise plans start at $16.50/month, but conveniently leave out the part that you have to pay upfront for a whole year until the checkout page. Want a monthly plan? That's $33/month.
5. Instalment pricing highlight. Another way e-commerce sites often bait customers with a misleading lower price is by showing the monthly instalment price of a product in large and bold font. This makes the product seem affordable at a glance, only to be surprised by the actual price later. Amazon does this frequently.
6. Pre-filled addons. Companies, especially travel sites, often automatically add upsell add-ons to our carts. Many don't notice these add-ons and end up paying more than the actual price. Tip: Always review the price breakdown before paying.
7. Confirmshaming. Travel sites are again more notorious than others in this category. You might've seen “No, I don't want to insure my trip” checkboxes while booking flights. These companies aim to guilt us into buying their upsell offers.
8. Algorithmic pricing. Companies such as taxi services like Uber or food delivery apps often use our personal information and device metrics to charge us more money. The more the company's algorithm predicts we can pay for a product, the higher the pricing shown to us. Tip: Compare prices across the same app or multiple apps if you have more than one device, or a friend near you.
9. Painful cancellations. While every company makes subscribing as easy as possible, some make cancellation difficult to retain subscribers. For example, I once had to get on a customer support chat to cancel a NYTimes subscription. Adobe is infamous for charging an early cancellation fee.
10. Evergreen “limited-time” sales. Limited-time offers sell because they conjure a deadline to push us to decide whether to purchase a product or not. Many companies, such as Udemy, exploit this behaviour to run sales throughout the year that are advertised as limited time offers. The limited-time offer stays active the next week, and the week after that.
11. Fake scarcity callouts. Ecommerce sites, such as Amazon, often show “Only 2 left in stock” when you linger on an item. While this can be true, often it's used as a technique to push us towards the checkout as quickly as possible by inducing a fear of losing the item.
12. Expiring cart timers. Another way e-commerce sites like Amazon pressure us into buying is by showing a countdown to complete checkout to buy at the deal price. Amazon's Lightning Deals are a good example, which ask us to complete checkout within 15 minutes after adding a deal item to the cart.
13. Artificial reservation holds. Travel companies employ a variation of expiring cart timers with messages like “We're holding this price for 9:03 min”. This pressures us to complete the checkout quickly without slowing down to review the purchase carefully. Agoda does this on their checkout page.
14. Drip pricing. I haven't come across this yet, but some sites reveal their product pricing in steps or drips. For example, you pay $75 to receive a slimmed-down version of the advertised product, and then pay another $67 for the full package. Tiered pricing isn't bad or deceptive. Hiding the tiers from the initial offer and then sending a surprise bill is where the problem lies.
15. Fake social proofs. Many apps and other sites put up fake testimonials to instill trust in their product. At a glance, the glowing reviews make the product feel worth paying for, but it's prudent to check whether these are actual reviews. Tip: If the reviews feature a photo of the reviewer, see if it looks AI-generated or like a regular stock photo.
16. Bottomless flash sales. Flash sales or staggered discounts, when done ethically, are fantastic ways to get a product at a heavy discount by being early adopters. But many vendors misuse this approach by selling an endless quantity of products under the banner “Only 6 left at this price.”
17. Marked-up discounts. I suppose we've all seen these discounts both online and offline. Mark up a product much higher than the regular price, and then apply a discount to sell at the originally intended price. It feels like you're getting a massive discount, when you're actually paying full price.
18. Price baits. Travel companies are once again infamous for exploiting this approach. Advertise a flight or hotel at a lucrative price that's extremely rare to get and only shows up under highly specific conditions that you're unlikely to satisfy. For example, I saw an ad for an Air India flight from Delhi to London at an attractive price. Upon clicking the ad, I couldn't find a flight that was selling at that price, even across a wide date range. The base price (without tax and other add-ons) was at least 20–30% higher than what was advertised.
19. Shipping deadlines. Want this item delivered by tomorrow? Order within the next 30 minutes. While this can sometimes be genuinely calculated based on logistics data, they're often put in place to pressure us into buying what we're looking at. Amazon is a prime example of this pattern.
20. “Best picks” by an aggregator or marketplace. Items that are hailed as top picks on ecommerce platforms are often the ones that pay the most commission or have the largest advertising spend. Tip: Search for the brand and the product on Google or Reddit to have an unbiased impression of the quality.
21. Pay to unlock the result. Ever come across those annoying websites that make you do all the work without any pricing in sight and then ask you to pay to see the result? They rely on the sunk cost fallacy, where you're more likely to ultimately pay if you've already invested time and effort to reach the checkout point.

Now, while I've added tips to remedy a few of the dark patterns, the universal solution to combating these unethical practices is to take a step back when you feel you're being manipulated to pay and think whether you actually want to buy the item you're looking at.

Knowing and remembering the various patterns used will help you gain the perspective to reflect when needed.

And I hope this list will help you do that.

By the way, if you're looking to track your spending and understand your financial habits so that you can spend money more consciously, I've made an app for that.