A crackdown on online shopping tricks is welcome, but doesn’t go far enough

Hurry! Only two left! Fourteen people bought this in the last hour! Fifty people are looking at this item!

Anyone who shops online will be familiar with these kinds of messages popping up on their screen. The online equivalent of a pushy salesperson, they are designed to create a sense of urgency around making a purchase.

These online tools are sometimes referred to as “dark patterns” – clever tricks built into apps and websites to encourage you to do things you may not necessarily want to do – like click the “buy” button. One large study revealed that over 11,000 shopping websites use these strategies.

For years this was seen as an inevitable – and irritating – part of online shopping. That’s beginning to change. The UK’s main consumer regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, has been probing retailers on these very issues for the past few years.

And there have been noticeable successes against companies using misleading countdown timers and urgency claims, which they have since agreed to stop.

The CMA also has sharper teeth than before. Since April 2025, it has been given direct enforcement powers, including the ability to impose fines of up to 10% of a business’s worldwide turnover.

And there are new rules due in early 2027 on subscription contracts that will tackle practices such as pressure selling at renewals and hard-to-cancel subscriptions.

The CMA is trying to track down deception. Was the countdown clock real or not? Was the previous price quoted ever actually charged?

But there is another effect of dark patterns that regulation doesn’t yet touch – what happens to you psychologically, after weeks, months, or years following the experience of being treated as the victim of these tactics, whether they’re technically accurate or not.

Research shows that scarcity cues, such as countdown timers, not only affect purchase decisions, but they also create a sense of time urgency and increased mental load on customers .

Studies have suggested a kind of emotional exhaustion, known as “digital burnout” that can occur due to heavy usage of digital consumer platforms, which are constantly fed to individuals via the algorithms they have developed.

Even a compliant, accurate countdown timer is designed to generate a sense of urgency and panic. A true “only two left” still makes you feel pressured.