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Comment by woutr_be | Hacker News Reader

One of the absolute worst dark patterns I’ve seen was on Foodpanda. When you’re just browsing, you see prices crossed out, with a cheaper price below it, which seems to indicate there’s some sort of promotion.

You can continue browsing a specific restaurant, and order a “discounted” item, your total price will be the sum of the discounted items. That is, up until you actually want to check out, suddenly your total jumps back to the sum of the original valued of the items. Because, apparently, that discount was only for “pro” users. It’s nowhere mentioned that is the case. And since I’m logged in, they already know I’m not a pro user.

This pissed me of so much, I documented and reported this to the local consumer council, but haven’t heard back yet.

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I have a (not really serious, but kind of) theory that metrics driven organizations stumble into various dark patterns through software bugs. In this case, that would look like:

1. You want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.

2. Because of a bug in the code somewhere, you end up showing the discounted price in the cart until checkout.

3. Because some number of people don't pay attention and don't realize the switcheroo happens at the end this bug actually increases conversion.

4. Someone eventually notices the bug (after customers like you complain about it!).

5. When they fix it the metrics are adversely impacted.

6. The bug is now a "feature".

This is of course all very shortsighted since you are essentially burning customer trust for a short-term gain in conversion so it's bad for the medium/long term business. But the team has to hit its KPIs, which are tracked on a daily/weekly basis!

I don't think you need bugs for that:

1. You (as a product owner/manager) want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.

2. You don't care about the the experience of the non-pro users, because that's not the metric you're optimizing, so you never specify to developers what should happen when lower-class users shop, except that at the end they have to pay the full price

3. Developers build something that works like the dark pattern described above (they are incentivized by keeping their sprint goals, not by making non-pro users happy).

I don't think this was a bug, but more a deliberate feature. From my understanding, they probably target customers who don't order that much, but are willing to pay a monthly fee for the "pro" features, which includes free delivery, and some discounts.

But I can't comprehend how this is worth it to Foodpanda, I'm an already paying customer, ordering 3-4 times a week, me not being a "pro" user should be making them money, since I pay full price, and pay delivery fees. What they've done now, is not converted me to "pro", and lost me as a customer.

Yeah, that's why I can't help but think that some of these dark patterns arise as bugs. Maybe I just have too much faith in humanity, but I can't imagine some PM sitting there thinking this would be a good idea that wouldn't eventually blow up in their faces. But who knows, maybe I'm just naive.

i would think that it was the customer who came up with the idea, not the pm.

I've had kind of similar things before with DoorDash or UberEats. They'll show I have a discount or some amount off ($5 usually), and then only once I'm ready to actually submit my order the full fine print shows up that I needed to have a subtotal of $30, $40, or whatever. Maybe that's fine for a family but for one person it stinks to think "oh cool I've got a discount" and I waste my time thumbing through restaurants and putting together an order only for it to not be worth it.

I truly don't get these kind of patterns, because to me, it just looks like they'll miss out on orders from people (like you), who thought they would get a discount, but then end up not getting it and cancelling their order.

Surely it would make more sense to advertise that customers can get a $5 discount, if they order for $30 or more. That way, if your order only adds up to $25, I would be inclined to order a side that gets me to $30 or more.

Not only cancel, but have a negative reaction to the app, and avoid ordering in future when they may have if treated fairky.

Amazon does this bullshit all the time with VAT.

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