Dark Patterns in Indian E-Commerce Interfaces and Consumer Purchase Regret
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrjss.2025.v05.n01.052Keywords:
Dark patterns, consumer purchase regret, e-commerce, consumer protection, deceptive designAbstract
Dark patterns are user-interface designs that are designed to trick users into making a purchase or giving up their data that they would not have made otherwise. On 30 November 2023, India introduced them within the framework of the law through the Central Consumer Protection Authority's notification of the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, which declared thirteen practices as being unfair trade practices under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. This paper explores the prevalence of these practices in the Indian Digital Commerce landscape and the routes via which these practices elicit purchase regret in the consumers. The study relied solely on the secondary sources of the regulatory instrument and its taxonomy, prevalence studies published by the ASCI Academy and Parallel study (12,000 screens across 53 Indian apps), international benchmark studies (11,000 shopping sites and 240 mobile apps), and the enforcement orders of the Central Consumer Protection Authority. The results have shown that deceptive design is almost ubiquitous with 52 of the 53 examined applications featuring at least one deceptive pattern, and the e-commerce sector had 5.3 patterns per application as compared to the average of 2.7 across all examined sectors. The four patterns (namely: privacy deception, drip pricing, interface interference and false urgency) represent 78 per cent of all events recorded. These can be mapped to the components of regret theory and it seems that the latter mainly causes process regret, which comes from a wrong decision procedure, and not outcome regret, which comes from a bad product. The paper suggests that this distinction is relevant to the regulation, as process harms cannot be measured in satisfaction-based consumer metrics and recommends disclosure-based remedies, implementation of an interface audit protocol and the creation of an enforcement system suited to the scale of the problem.
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