Traps & Dark Patterns
The countdown timer that resets when you reload
A clock on a page is a design element, not a fact about stock. Some of them are honest and the honest ones behave differently.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Countdown timers, fake anchors, drip pricing and how to read past them.
20 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Traps & Dark Patterns
What a was price has to mean, and why proving it is hard
Most markets require a reference price to have been genuine. The requirement is easier to write than to enforce, and the gap is where the trouble lives.
More in Traps & Dark Patterns
Traps & Dark Patterns
Why the first number you see is the smallest one you will pay
Splitting a price into stages puts the lowest possible figure in the advertisement and the rest somewhere you have already…
Traps & Dark Patterns
A bundle can be cheaper and worse value at the same time
Paying less than the sum of the parts means nothing if you would never have bought several of the parts.
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
The default is a price, and somebody chose which way it points
Pre-selected options, opt-out extras and quietly ticked boxes are pricing decisions disguised as convenience.
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
Monthly instalments are a way of not showing the total
Quoting a small recurring figure changes what a purchase feels like without changing what it costs, and the total is usually…
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.
Traps & Dark Patterns
Was, from and up to: the small words that carry the claim
The qualifier attached to a price does more legal work than the number itself, and it is always printed smaller.