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By Rodrigo Santos Andrade
A crackdown on online shopping tricks is welcome, but doesn’t go far enough
visibility comment0 event October 14, 2026 timer 12:29
Consumers don’t need the extra pressure to purchase.
ViDI Studio/ShutterstockHurry! Only two left! Fourteen people bought this in the last hour! Fifty people are looking at this item!
Anyone who shops online will be familiar with these kinds of messages popping up on their screen. The online equivalent of a pushy salesperson, they are designed to create a sense of urgency around making a purchase.
These online tools are sometimes referred to as “dark patterns” – clever tricks built into apps and websites to encourage you to do things you may not necessarily want to do – like click the “buy” button. One large study revealed that over 11,000 shopping websites use these strategies.
For years this was seen as an inevitable – and irritating – part of online shopping. That’s beginning to change. The UK’s main consumer regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, has been probing retailers on these very issues for the past few years.
And there have been noticeable successes against companies using misleading countdown timers and urgency claims, which they have since agreed to stop.
The CMA also has sharper teeth than before. Since April 2025, it has been given direct enforcement powers, including the ability to impose fines of up to 10% of a business’s worldwide turnover.
And there are new rules due in early 2027 on subscription contracts that will tackle practices such as pressure selling at renewals and hard-to-cancel subscriptions.
This is all real and meaningful progress.
The CMA is trying to track down deception. Was the countdown clock real or not? Was the previous price quoted ever actually charged?
But there is another effect of dark patterns that regulation doesn’t yet touch – what happens to you psychologically, after weeks, months, or years following the experience of being treated as the victim of these tactics, whether they’re technically accurate or not.
Research shows that scarcity cues, such as countdown timers, not only affect purchase decisions, but they also create a sense of time urgency and increased mental load on customers .
Studies have suggested a kind of emotional exhaustion, known as “digital burnout” that can occur due to heavy usage of digital consumer platforms, which are constantly fed to individuals via the algorithms they have developed.
Even a compliant, accurate countdown timer is designed to generate a sense of urgency and panic. A true “only two left” still makes you feel pressured.
Pressure to purchase
My own ongoing research looks at the potential impact of AI-powered personalisation and nudging, which is getting more sophisticated every day. It is already becoming extremely adept at reading shoppers’ behaviour.
Read more:
Drunk online shopping is big business – but who is responsible?
And this sort of pattern has been observed by researchers before. The psychological toll of constant algorithmic pressure is a distinct problem from whether or not a given claim is false.
The CMA can put an end to companies misinforming you on the matter of scarcity. It doesn’t have a way to correct for the effect over time of constant and accurate urgency messaging on stress levels or decision fatigue, which it’s not currently asked to address by the consumer protection law.
The question of whether something is true or not is one thing. But the effect that question has on consumers is an entirely separate issue that customers need to be aware of.
The CMA’s new powers give the regulator a credible deterrent that it did not have before. But they are yet to address the more complex and elements of dark patterns, which relate to how they actually make people feel.
Nauman Wajid does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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