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Comment by soganess | Hacker News Reader

For people saying this to calculate the final price with shipping and tax, it's not (or at least not entirely). It is for this new sales conversion dark pattern where prices aren't listed until you add to cart.

Ebay sellers are particularly bad offenders: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-1...

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Google disagrees with you:

> When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation. The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements.

this is what we've seen as well. it validates that whatever price, promo, shipping and taxes you've put into your feed is what ends up in the final checkout and there's no bait-and-switch going on between the feed and reality.

it's rather annoying because it creates dozens of "abandoned" carts per day which we have to continually clear out (based on Google's known ip address ranges) so our reps can go through actual abandoned carts.

This is more likely just a contractual MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policy by the manufacturer, not a dark pattern that is of the retailer's choosing.

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-minimum-advertised-pri...

I personally believe that anything that can be automated by software should be automated by software. If it takes programmatically clicking exactly the same A, B, C, D sequence to display what the user wants, that clicking should be done by the machine, not the human.

What am I missing on here? That item has the price listed without having to Add To Cart.

The modal that pops up is not in the dom until you click the "See details" link, which has target="javascript:;". The "Add to cart" button is an actual link. I wouldn't be surprised if Google just doesn't want to run javascript to extract pricing information if it doesn't necessarily have to.

That clearly has a see details button that shows the price.

Most dark patterns have a non-intuitive way of circumventing them (the small-font faded-color "no, thank you" button comes to mind). That is Ebay's.

Other examples here: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/83050/price-too-low-t...

Amazon example from a few years ago: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/ztyT6xTPaTr9TtP8LwlRJBE6RV...

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