Busting the halo around online shopping and its perks

Chennai

So many shower curtains! But with the endless choice comes the risk of being fooled. In our pandemic-altered 2020, it’s felt essential for many of us to be able to buy almost anything from home. One thousand varieties of shower curtains at our fingertips! But being a truly informed online shopper now requires us to have an advanced degree in internet scams and the business of how products are marketed, sold and transported around the world. This is a pattern with online news, entertainment, merchandise and more. Seemingly endless choice is amazing, but it has also introduced more confusion and the risk of being fooled.

I still think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but I’m also tired from thinking so hard about buying a pressure cooker or whether that photo from a political protest is real or forged. My exhaustion reached a peak in the last few weeks. I wrote last month about bogus reviews on Amazon, and now I find myself eyeballing every online review for clues that it was bought off. I’ve always been sceptical, but now I don’t trust anything. This weekend, I listened to this podcast about Chinese mystery seeds. Remember all those news articles months ago about Americans who received plant seeds they didn’t order that arrived from China or other foreign countries?

It turns out that it was probably not a nefarious plot but rather the result of a surge in online ordering, paranoia about China and a common internet scam known as “brushing.” Brushing essentially involves a seller fabricating online orders to make a product appear more popular, and then trying to avoid detection by shipping a cheap and low-weight product, such as plant seeds, to a real person. Here is a more detailed explanation.

Not long ago I also had to explain to a family member why an item he bought on Amazon arrived on his doorstep in a Walmart shipping box. Short answer: The merchant on Amazon probably took the order, bought the same item for less on Walmart’s website, had it shipped directly to my relative, and pocketed the price difference as profit. This is another common e-commerce moneymaking tactic in the sea of complicated ways to game the system.

Online shopping is a massive industry, complete with consulting companies that advise on fake reviews, software sold for people to spot and take advantage of price differences and towns filled with warehouses to repackage online orders. This is how shopping works now. You can, of course, just click buy and be blissfully unaware of any of this. That’s fine! I know I’m that annoying person who screams “that’s a trick” when you’re just trying to order dish soap. But also know that there’s a risk we might be persuaded by bogus online reviews into buying a bad product, or we might believe we’re buying something from Amazon and instead purchase a dangerous toy from a no-name seller. Or maybe we freak out about seeds arriving at home out of seemingly nowhere.

The risk of going astray isn’t confined to shopping. Behind the Facebook post at the top of my feed, the series that Netflix recommends and the headphones that appear in Amazon’s one-click ordering are often elaborate, financially motivated games to influence what we do. This system of internet persuasion is not inherently bad, but it is helpful to understand how it works. It’s just that doing so is utterly exhausting.

Shira Ovide writes the On Tech newsletter for NYT©2020

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