BEWARE THE SHADY TRAPS OF E-COMM THIS FESTIVE SEASON

Dark patterns are well-crafted interface design tricks that seek to gain at the consumer's expense. This festive season, buyers must watch out for such shady practices

- HARISH BIJOOR

DUSSEHRA is done with and Diwali is ahead. Before, within and in between these two festivals, India buys up the goodies it loves. Even as the Dussehra sales close, online marketplace sales have touched a record ₹55,000 crore ($6.5 billion) in one week. Even as the Diwali festive season begins and the card parties start, a whole market of buyers and sellers is ecstatic and ready to buy and sell even more.

India's online retail market is today all of $75 billion in value. As online retailers and their close cousins in direct-to-consumer e-commerce (D2C players) celebrate and prepare to sell more during their Diwali sales, I look at the consumer side of dynamics and peek at a rather concerning soft-underbelly issue of e-commerce and the virtual format of selling and buying. Harry Brignull, a London-based user-experience (UX) designer calls it a ‘dark pattern'.

E-commerce dark patterns are really bad practices purposely ingrained into websites we buy from. Brignull calls it out to be "deceptive practices carefully crafted to trick users into doing things not in their interest". These are scientifically crafted UX tricks that seek to gain at your expense. Must you watch out for these, even as you participate in the buying frenzy that has just closed and is equally about to unfold ahead?

For a start, let me call a spade a spade. When you buy on an e-commerce platform, you give a lot. You pay with your time, money, and equally your privacy. The data you leave on the platform is something that gets to become footsteps you have left behind that will be followed to make you buy more. The important point to insist on is that you want to be responsibly used. You are being used as a customer, but you want it to be done with responsibility and with least irritation, aggression, deceit and the marketing UX lie.