Whether it’s Amazon, Ikea or Zalando: many people shop online these days. It’s easy and quick. But now the police are warning. Because: Hardly anyone notices how the shop operators manipulate customers. And many then buy things they never wanted to buy. These are the tricks of the online shops.
There are bargains in online shops on every corner. Whether it’s Black Friday or the summer sale, whether an offer is valid “only today” or “only 10 items left”: Amazon and other shop operators are now using many tricks to manipulate customers. Sometimes they even go a step too far. And boom, you suddenly bought something that you didn’t want at all. Because somehow it ended up in the shopping cart. The police are now warning of the tricks used by online shop operators.
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The European Commission commissioned a study to investigate the methods and tricks used to influence consumers. The pages of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Ebay, Zalando and Ikea and apps such as WhatsApp and TikTok were examined. “Certain buttons are highlighted in color, selection fields are already pre-filled or certain items such as consumables are automatically added to the selected product in the shopping cart,” explains the police . What at first glance looks like special customer service turns out to be an attempt to manipulate users on closer inspection.
The European Commission study also provides examples. In the case of Amazon, for example, insurance ends up in the shopping cart when you buy a certain product. Anyone who then goes to the checkout online and does not pay attention has bought the insurance directly. Other shops use colored buttons to indicate that a product is on sale. But that’s not always the case, as the study notes, as the example shows. Here the price that is highlighted is the same as the one that was crossed out.
IKEA: ONLINE SHOPS WORK WITH THESE TRICKS
One of the most popular brands in Germany, Ikea, also uses tricks to get its customers’ money. Anyone who orders an item from the furniture store online can have it delivered to an Ikea branch. Ikea calls the system Click & Collect , which costs 10 euros. The study comes to the conclusion that most items are in stock in the branch anyway. So if you buy an item online, you shouldn’t have to pay a fee if you pick it up locally.
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In addition to Amazon and Ikea, there are also online shops such as Zalando and eBay that use a completely different trick to manipulate their customers. With information such as “Only a limited number of items” or a countdown next to the price, online shop operators try to signal to the customer that he has to hurry to get hold of a certain product at the supposedly low price. Experts call this “emotional pressure”. The customer should be driven to make a purchase.
MOST CUSTOMERS DO NOT EVEN KNOW MANY TRICKS
In the more than 300-page study , the European Commission names many other tricks that Amazon and other online shops use to pull money out of customers’ pockets. It’s not always as obvious as the extra insurance in Amazon’s shopping cart. Operators often work under emotional pressure. It’s usually easier to subscribe online than it is to cancel. Amazon also relies on confusion, as we show in this article. Once you have finally found the “Cancel Membership” button, you will be placed in front of the options “Forgo benefits” and “Keep benefits” on the next level. Sometimes the provider designs the click path to different options with different lengths in order to persuade the user to choose the supposedly simpler variant.
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The study comes to the conclusion that, despite the many existing instruments and legal provisions, further legal adjustments are still necessary in order to be able to take better action against the manipulative tricks.
