Shopping Tactics
Unit price is the only number on the shelf that compares like with like
Pack prices are designed to be incomparable. The small print showing price per unit undoes most of that work in a second.
Rajat Oberoi
Contributing writer, Deals Ka Baap
Rajat writes about returns and warranties, and reads terms so you do not have to.
Contact Rajat through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
16 articles
Shopping Tactics
Price history turns a discount claim into something you can test
A percentage off tells you nothing without a series behind it. A series turns marketing into evidence you can read yourself.
Shopping Tactics
The same product under a different model number
Retailer-specific variants exist to make comparison impossible. Once you know they exist, the differences are usually easy to find.
Shopping Tactics
Splitting one purchase across two sellers
When only part of what you want is discounted, buying it as one transaction can cost more than buying it as two.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Free delivery above a threshold is an instruction to your basket
A delivery threshold does not reduce your costs. It changes what you buy, and it is extremely good at it.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Fifty per cent off and then twenty is not seventy
Successive discounts multiply rather than add, and the difference between those two operations is where a surprising amount of…
Traps & Dark Patterns
Personalised pricing: what it can and cannot do to you
Prices that vary by shopper are real, less common than assumed, and frequently confused with three other things that look identical…
Traps & Dark Patterns
A discount code printed on every page has become the price
A reduction available to everyone, permanently, is not a reduction. It is a two-stage price with a small test of attention in the…
Traps & Dark Patterns
Pack sizes that exist so that nothing lines up
When every brand in an aisle uses a slightly different quantity, comparison stops being arithmetic and starts being work.
Shopping Tactics
Three quotes are worth nothing until the scope matches
Comparing service prices means comparing what each provider has actually promised to do, and that is rarely the same thing.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Paying in your own currency at a foreign checkout
Being offered a familiar currency at the point of payment looks like a convenience and is usually a separately priced service.
Traps & Dark Patterns
A free trial is a diary entry you did not write down
The trial is not the product being sold; the product is the gap between when you stop paying attention and when the charge starts.
Traps & Dark Patterns
The free gift is valued by the person giving it away
An included extra is described using a figure the seller chose, and that figure answers a different question from what it is worth…
Traps & Dark Patterns
When two shelf labels refuse to use the same unit
Unit pricing only compares like with like when both labels measure in the same thing, and a surprising number of them do not.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Sale prices with a list of things they do not apply to
An exclusion list is where a headline offer is quietly resized, and the items left out are rarely chosen at random.
Traps & Dark Patterns
This price is only good today, said the person selling it
A quote that expires at the end of a conversation is a device for preventing comparison, not a reflection of any underlying cost.