Dark patterns cost more than they capture

In January 2023 consumer authorities from 23 EU states, Norway and Iceland screened 399 retail websites and apps for three specific manipulative design practices. They found at least one on 148 of them. Forty-two sites ran fake countdown timers. Fifty-four used layout or wording to steer people towards a particular choice. Seventy hid important information or made it hard to find.

That is 37% of the shops sampled, and the sweep only looked for three patterns out of the dozen or so that have names.

What counts as a dark pattern

The term covers any interface designed to get people to do something they did not set out to do. The countdown timer that resets when you reload. The pre-ticked insurance add-on. The cancel button that is grey text under a bright green “Keep my subscription”. The “No thanks, I don’t want to save money” link. The account you had to create to see a price.

None of these are accidents. Each one exists because somebody ran a test, saw the number go up, and shipped it. The number that went up was the one being measured that week. The numbers that went down were not on the dashboard.

The Australian picture

The Consumer Policy Research Centre surveyed 2,000 Australians in April 2022 on their experience of manipulative design. 83% had suffered at least one negative consequence from it. More than one in four had created an account they did not want. More than one in four had signed up to something by accident. One in four had shared more personal information than they meant to. Nearly one in ten had bought something they did not intend to.

The number that should interest anyone running a business is a different one. 30% of respondents said that when they ran into a dark pattern, they stopped using the site or app. The trick captured a purchase from one person and cost the next customer entirely, and the second effect never appears in the A/B test that justified the first.

Regulators moved from warnings to invoices

For most of the last decade the enforcement risk was theoretical. Now it arrives as an invoice.

In December 2022 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Epic Games to pay $245 million in refunds over dark patterns in Fortnite that led players, many of them children, into unintended purchases. The design decisions named in the complaint included a button layout where a single misplaced press charged the account, and a cancellation process that was deliberately harder than the purchase.

In September 2025 the same regulator settled with Amazon for $2.5 billion over Prime enrolment and cancellation. A $1 billion civil penalty, and $1.5 billion in refunds to roughly 35 million people who were enrolled without meaning to be or were steered away from cancelling. The internal name for the cancellation flow, revealed in the case, was “Iliad”, after a long and difficult journey, so Amazon knew exactly what it had built.

Australia is heading the same way. Unfair trading practices are being written into consumer law, and the ACCC has named manipulative design as a priority. The EU’s Digital Services Act already prohibits it outright on platforms.

The tactics do not survive contact with your own data

Set the legal risk aside for a moment and look purely at outcomes.

Baymard’s checkout research, which we covered in checkout and form friction, puts forced account creation among the top reasons people abandon a purchase. That is a dark pattern measured from the other side: the sign-ups it captures are visible, the abandoned carts are visible too, and the second number is larger.

Subscription businesses that make cancelling hard get a short-term retention bump and a long-term chargeback problem. A chargeback costs more than the month of revenue it disputes, and enough of them gets your merchant account reviewed. People who could not cancel also tell other people, and they tell them in reviews, where the story outlives the subscription by years.

Pre-ticked add-ons inflate average order value and inflate refund requests by a similar amount, with support time on top.

What honest design looks like in practice

Honest design still makes money. You set up the choice so that people who want the thing take it and people who do not can decline in one obvious step.

Make the decline option a real button with the same weight as the accept, worded neutrally. Untick every add-on. If a timer exists, make it real and let it expire. Put the price where people look for it, before they commit to anything. Let people cancel the way they signed up: if it took one click to start, it takes one click to stop. Ask for an account after the purchase, not before, and make guest checkout the default path.

Then measure the things the dark pattern hid. Repeat purchase rate. Refunds. Support tickets per order. Review sentiment. Chargeback rate. Those are the numbers a manipulative pattern moves in the wrong direction, and they are the numbers that determine whether a business is still here in three years.

Audit what you already have

Most sites did not set out to deceive anyone. The patterns accumulate: a growth experiment that was never rolled back, a plugin default nobody changed, a checkout template copied from a competitor who copied it from somebody else.

Walk through your own purchase and cancellation flows as a customer would, on a phone, and write down every point where the easy option and the honest option diverge. That list is the audit, and it is usually short enough to fix in a sprint.

This is design work we do as a matter of course, and the fixes rarely cost conversions. If you want a second pair of eyes on a flow you are not sure about, get in touch.

References

• Consumer protection: manipulative online practices found on 148 out of 399 online shops screened, European Commission, January 2023
• Duped by design: Manipulative online design, dark patterns in Australia, Consumer Policy Research Centre, 2022
• Fortnite video game maker Epic Games to pay more than half a billion dollars over FTC allegations, Federal Trade Commission, December 2022
• FTC secures historic $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon, Federal Trade Commission, September 2025