If you are going to be a successful rental dealer, in addition to whatever else you do to get a leg up on the competition, you are going to need a vibrant, easy-to-navigate, informative, friendly, and attractive Web presence. This piece is about how not to do it.
Whether it be your only connection to the marketplace or merely an important avenue, you cannot afford to have a half-baked website. It is increasingly where Americans shop, or at the beginning of the shopping experience.
A group of professors from Princeton and the University of Chicago did a study a while ago of retail websites, some 11,000 of them examining how those sites marketed their goods and services to consumers. Their findings showed that on 11% of the sites, the marketing tactics used showed what the professors labelled “dark patterns,” defined as “user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.” Rental dealers have trouble enough with being accused of sharp practices by their very existences to have websites visible to the whole world that exhibit these dark patterns.
The academics divided the practices into seven broad categories containing 15 specific kinds of dark patterns. The good news is that none of the websites reported on had anything to do with RTO. Those in the trade, the marketing trade, that is, may well take issue with some of the academics’ findings. They may well argue, and persuasively so, that there is nothing illegal or in any way deceptive about some of the patterns identified as dark. Academics can more easily get published if what they say is “out there.” Dealers will have to judge for themselves which practices are to be shunned and which are perfectly acceptable business practices, necessary to remain competitive. Regardless of a dealer’s conclusion, it will be useful to think through how dealers present themselves on the Internet with the goal of moving product.
Here are the broad categories of dark patterns: Sneaking, Urgency, Misdirection, Social Proof, Scarcity, Obstruction, and Forced Action. Dealers can go to the full article for an explanation of these categories in more detail than is possible here as well as the methodology employed to study the websites: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07032.pdf .
![To avoid being labeled as a dark pattern, the information [on your website] need only be truthful and not presented in such a fashion as to be difficult to access or understand.](https://www.rtohq.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2021-Summer-Dark-Patterns-on-the-Internet-2.jpg)
Sneaking includes adding things to a shopping cart without the customer’s consent, adding fees or charges at the last minute, or charging a recurring fee when the deal was pitched as a onetime fee or a free trial. Items snuck into the basket may be promoted as “bonuses” or “necessary for best results.” Last-minute charges may be added and disclosed after a customer has gone through the process to fill out an order form with address and billing information and so when the additional charge is added, the customer may have the cognitive bias of the sunk cost fallacy that encourages him to go ahead with the deal and accept the surprise additional charge.
Urgency includes having a countdown timer on the site showing when the deal offered will expire or advertising a “limited time” offer without specifying a deadline. It is certainly acceptable to put a fuse on specials. The dark patterns that the professors uncovered was when the websites offered false fuses. A deal would have an expiration date or timer after which the site proclaimed that the deal went away. But when the researchers left the site and returned after the supposed expiration, the deal was back unchanged except for a new expiration date.
Misdirection is a grab bag of practices, including trick questions; visual interference — setting up the screen to obscure certain information; pressured selling, and “confirmsharing.” Misdirection in another context is how magicians perform magic tricks. On a website, the sharp practices are designed to steer consumers toward a desired choice and away from an undesired one without actually restricting choice. With confirmsharing, for example, the site will use language and emotion cues to discourage certain choices. On the old Radio Shack site, for example, visitors were asked for their email address and permission to send out information to the address in exchange for a discount. They were presented with two boxes to click: “Yes, I’d like the discount” or “No thanks, I like to pay full price.” So the visitor seems to have a choice, but not really.
Social Proof includes testimonials from other users that may or may not be valid. Social proof also includes activity messages about the number of purchases, numbers of visits to the site, and other statistics to give customers comfort that they are making a good decision and one in line with lots of other consumers. This kind of information may be on the up and up and secured from real customers or it may be created out of thin air, in which case, it is clearly dark.
Scarcity includes messages that tell users that quantities are limited or that the product is in high demand and may sell out soon. There may be live clickers on the site showing an increasing number of transactions or a decreasing number of available products.
Obstruction means making it easy to sign up and hard to cancel. It’s the roach motel ploy. Visitors may have an easy entry into some special arrangement with the company merely by making a few clicks on the website, but to get loose they will have to call a customer service number that is obscure and hard to find on the site.
Forced Action means requiring users to register or create an account before being able to get needed information about the goods and services being shopped for.
It can indeed be the case that “supplies are limited” in an RTO company, especially during these days of restricted vendor supplies. Special discounts can be offered, and are, with an expiration date to encourage action by consumers. Sites can offer testimonials from other customers about the features and benefits of a product or merely how wonderfully responsive the company has been to customer concerns and issues. To avoid being labelled as a dark pattern, for the most part, the information need only be truthful and not presented in such a fashion as to be difficult to access or understand.
The Internet, however, is replete with merchants peddling goods whose only desire is to close the deal, truth be damned. We are all conditioned to that reality and are appropriately skeptical of the information we get from the Web. As merchants in a frequently maligned industry, it does RTO dealers little good to add to the confusion and skepticism. Moreover, dealers can certainly run successful and profitable businesses without going over entirely to the “dark side.”
Ed Winn III serves as APRO General Counsel. For legal advice, members in good standing can email legal@rtohq.org.
