The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page.
I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks.
Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
As an opposing pov: we mostly use booking.com for our reservations, and have never had an issue with them, and found their support useful the one or two times we needed it. They're the best reservation site that I know (others are way worse), and are fairly customer friendly [+]. I still book directly whenever I can because I don't want the hosts to pay the rather large booking.com fees... but we often find places to stay through them, and use them for 1 night stays, or places that don't necessarily inspire lots of confidence (e.g. have custom-implemented payment methods), or places that require payment in advance while offering cancel-able options on booking.com.
[+] Yes they use scare tactics but come on, they're easy to ignore. Who cares it's the only available room and 500 people are looking at it right now and 5 of them are already typing in the credit card details? Not me. If I can't get that particular room, I'll get another one, whatever. (I guess it also helps that we often book ~1year in advance, so we're reasonably confident that we'll eventually find something).
> Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Expedia Group). The apartment that we rented wasn't at all what was advertised, so we left after one night. VRBO first said that because we left voluntarily, there was nothing they could do. After pointing out that we still have our booking as active, they said we need to talk to the owner directly. After pointing out that the owner is just ignoring our messages, they just said that they handle as a middle-man between us and the owner.
After pointing out that the apartment isn't what is advertised, and that the reviews don't even match the property, they said that we agreed to their terms and conditions. I then spend a couple of hours looking at their other terms and conditions, and pointing out that the owner had agreed with these, but that they had broken several of their terms and conditions by apparently using the same listing for multiple properties.
VRBO finally agreed and refunded us their 10% service fee, but claimed that the rest of the money is already with the owner, so we need to talk to them for a refund. (They have ignored us for weeks now)
I'm still baffled that they would handle it this way. First completely dodging any responsibility, only taking some responsibility after highlighting that the owner had broken several of their rules, and only refunding us their service fees. I never paid any money directly to the owner, so I have no clue how the owner will ever refund me.
At this point I don't even really care about the money that was lost, but the fact that both VRBO and the owner are willing to just take my money (1500 EURO), for a single night in their falsely advertised property infuriates me to no end. And I'm doing anything in my power to make their lives as difficult as possible.
> Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
Consider yourself lucky. For me it was 20eur take it or leave it, on 500eur loss.
<rant>
I consider cancellation/refund policies that end before your arrival technically - a scam. The situation was like that - the apartment was booked with cancellation available 3 (or smth) days before arrival [0]. Upon arrival - the place was cigarette reeking, bedbug infested, with 30 year old completely worn out mattresses disgusting place. Owner says - "sorry - no refunds" [1], booking says - "we talked to the owner, cancellation policy has ended, the reviews are above average" [2][3]. Upon other calls they gave me 20eur. Bank could not issue a refund, because everything was up to policy.
Though I still use booking.com. I learned to ignore those dark patterns, because it's obvious that 1 spot is left for an apartment, there are no more to it :) . I had only 1 horrible experience with them, but had much worse with AirBNB. Booking.com is great to search all types of accommodation and it's often possible to find a way to book directly and for cheaper, so using it sort of as a search engine.
</rant>
[0] from my experience it's usually like that, cancellations/refunds until your arrival usually add exorbitant amounts to the price
[1] though owner suggested ordering cleaning services, but that place needed crime scene level cleaning and complete refurbishment
[2] lesson learned: always sort reviews by newest and translate from foreign languages, because newest 3 reviews were horrifying. But I have not read them, because have not translated them, or have not seen them. Because default sorting shows by "relevant", i.e. foreign language reviews are on the bottom and the other sort order is a mystery to me.
[3] it seams that people do not know how to vote in reviews. If you returned from vacation and infested your own home with bed bugs, and had multitude of other problems - do not give 7 or 8 as a review score - give it a 1. Booking.com used those reviews against me - "if it's above 8 - we cannot do anything about it".
In South Korea all the hotels we booked on booking.com cancels the booking when you arrive and you pay on the desk. That's how they do it not to pay the booking.com tax.
However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it.
Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
We arrived at a hotel, then found out we could get the room for a cheaper rate than we got on booking.
The hotel was very helpful, and we cancelled the booking both from our, as well as the hotel’s side. Nonetheless it took Booking.com days to decide that the refund was legitimate.
I also have quite a few bad experiences with them, including some surprises with the actual hotel room, however I have had worse ones with other services, so I keep using them.
This only got better (at least here) because booking.com had to change their practices after legal action from the EU consumer protection commission.
> As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates.
> Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest:
* Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform;
* Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards;
* Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results;
* Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount;
* Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference;
* Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way;
I booked a hotel room with them and when I arrived there, the hotel said they had no such record of my booking. I showed the receipts and all, but the hotel washed their hands off saying the server was down, etc. I contacted booking.com, but it was useless. I literally spent 2 hours in the hotel lobby trying to figure out what was going on and how I could get my money back. Their support is almost non-existent, especially for money related matters. The unhelpful thing their agent told me was "Oh, if you were wrongly charged, the amount would be credited back to your account in X days". I was so pissed off that I filed a chargeback with my credit card provider that very moment with all the evidence and then booked a room in a different hotel for the night for twice the budget I had. 4 business days later, I get spam calls from random numbers and guess who it was? Booking.com "We apologize, we will give you this credit into your account, bla bla" something along those lines.
Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.
The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'.
This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive.
Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged.
Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
>Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price.
I've only heard this in relation to physical stores though, not sure how it works for e-commerce.
I would add something (disclaimer I am involved in the management of a small hotel, this comes from my experience):
1) you will talk to a human
2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.)
3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0]
4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days)
[0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered
[1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
Might work in the US, but it's not always that easy. Some people do not like to talk over the phone in general. Also, if booking a stay abroad, the owner might not speak English.
This might work in the US, but the rest 80% of the world...
I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
>I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.
Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work.
In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
Here is what I do. Find the hotel on booking.com. Call the hotel directly. Tell them the price is what you found online - per night on booking.com. EVERY time they give me that rate over the phone. The end. Done.
I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned (among other things I did in particular latest version/implementation of "X other people looking at this") and TL;DR: All of it is real - and majority of people don't find it as annoying as you, many even find it helpful
---
While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams).
I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts.
On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you.
As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered.
---
And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived.
And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? I book hotels a few hours in advance and stats like "only 2 rooms left", are usually correct when I check with hotel reception. At least in Europe booking.com is much better than competition. It has loyalty discounts, transparent pricing and consistent experience. Reviews and descriptions are actually useful, not BS. Emails I get are usually "place you looked at become 30% cheaper".
As shop owner that switches to Woo I dig into many plugins the last year and only find a very few of those attention and countdown plugins that are kinda honest.
- The majority of 'users currently see this project' are looking a few hours back instead of being 100% fake. All of them allow faking the numbers somehow tho. There are plenty of 100% fake ones out there too tho.
- 'xxx just bought' things are usually real too. But also out of context and time. Plus all plugins I've seen allow you to add custom fake ones. Or even have some preenabled.
- While I was looking for the functionality to actually lock products when they are in a cart for 15 minutes or so because we have limited stock I found none of these plugins is actually doing this. All they do is adding a cookie and a fake timer.
There is more, way more. And I learned to avoid shops using any of those fake tactics.
In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data and I don't think users will ever notice the difference :/
> In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data
If you implemented the "looking at" functionality, are you keeping a connection open to the client (say, via WS) to determine if they are still looking as in keeping the tab open (or opencv with camera access to see that they are "actually" looking hehe), or are you just looking a few minutes back instead of hours?
How would one honestly implement this feature anyway?
I didn't. I don't think this feature would reflect reality at all, or rather reality wouldn't sell. I have a few hundred products and a few hundred daily visitors, so I am far from big enough to get some relevant numbers there :)
I would go for the minutes if I were big enough, or maybe a 1 hour time frame.
However I opted for other signals that better reflect reality like 'bought X times in the last X days' or 'product is in X wishlists' or 'this product is trending within our visitors'
IMO same effect, but honest and suitable for my size :)
Naively without thinking about it. Session Id, setInterval sending a ping every few seconds, clear the id if the ping fails to arrive. Smooth it by taking an average or sum over anywhere between a few minutes to a few days, depending on what you're selling. Some things take more thought and as such those numbers can be quite a bit higher.
There's no need to put any more thought in than that. It's a single design element, and you're not doing a scientific study or collecting marketing data here. This is fine.
I was once tasked with upgrading a small desktop application used by warehouse workers to fetch imprint data for an apparel printer.
The data was stored in a really inefficient way and so the operation took a stupidly long time. I decided to add a progress bar so that people don't think the app is busted (which they occasionally did). Turned out, much of the time spent was on the server's end, so I couldn't track the majority of the "progress".
I had already put effort into the bar, so I replaced the "real" progress tracking with a script that randomly incremented the progress. I tweaked some heuristics until it roughly matched the amount of time the server tended to take but was random enough to not be super obvious.
After the progress bar launched, someone from the warehouse actually walked up and thanked me for the progress bar.
Of course, that's all fun and games. Weird psychological manipulation in e-commerce is horrible.
The fact there isn't a straightforward back-pressure mechanism in browsers to get live updates on how much time is left for an upload or a download is why loading spinners are used everywhere instead of progress bars. You can implement it yourself using websockets and a ton of complexity, but then you need the entire socket tooling and security to be in place. It's one of few the things browsers are really missing in my opinion.
I think that virtually describes almost all progress bars. A better solution is a spinning wheel, because you don't need to figure out how long it would take. You just have to make sure the spinning wheel ocassionally stops and starts again to give users a sense that it's connected to something.
Indeterminate loading indicators are only appropriate for short load times. Anything longer and you definitely want to have something to inform the user of a timeline. Even if it’s a bit of a fib.
I love the author's rewriting of javascript into "human-readable" code[1], while retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor.
It feels like an excellent way of representing what is inside the programmer's mind when writing the code, and I will probably try to replicate it next time I coach a new student.
Not sure if I'm the only one, but I start writing code like this quite often.
At first it's "comment only" to describe what I'm trying to achieve and then I'm adding functional code in/around it. I find that really helpful, although some might say there's some "comment bloat" in the end, as I often keep the comments, too.
I usually do something like that when working with someone, though I write "real" code but using variables and functions that we don't yet have, so that we can agree on the structure of the code.
>retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor
I think its just their editor's syntax highlighting, likely for Javascript. Highlighting numbers in a different color definitely helps, but highlighting a very small subset (I assume only in and of) of random prepositions doesn't really do much.
I implemented this functionality for a certain SaaS with many large customers. I made sure to have a scalable way to measure unique viewers across different time frames. Only after we launched it, we realized all our competitors just put a random number that looked nice.
I am an engineer, not a lawyer, but I expect that from a criminal perspective it doesn't count as fraud because it isn't material information, and the consumer rights differ vastly between countries and probably don't cover "dishonest but immaterial information" - there weren't lies on the price, on availability, etc.
If a company asks me to implement something I believe is illegal I ask for clarifications from a lawyer. Since I wasn't asked to implement this in a "wrong" way, I never looked into it further.
Hmm, I think the fake number will bring more money, both short and long term.
If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7)
If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete.
Sadly, unless its illegal to lie, organizations are disincentivized to do the right thing.
Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion."
It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might, for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this example, it refreshed every time you reloaded the page. If you went back to the product it was a different number. If you HAVE to do this, at least use a cookie or something. The changing number makes the product, and by extension the whole site, look completely suspicious. One of the absolute number one things I want to do on a landing page/PDP is build trust. This falls at the first hurdle.
This wasn't implemented in the UK, but with a little Googling I ended up under the impression it would break trading laws over here.
A little meta, but certainly in the spirit of the article, and this is Hacker News after all.
When clicking on the 'comments' icon in the article, a sidebar open with the heading Responses (36). I'd not noticed I'd gone offline. After some time, the sidebar updated with There are currently no responses for this story. Be the first to respond. which is incorrect, as there should be 36 responses with the heading still there.
So not only don't have fraudulent counters as mentioned in the article, also provide responses that correctly reflect a state, error, etc, handling the response correctly rather than falling back on an inappropriate default.
This dark pattern is designing for anxiety. While there’s no specific accessibility guidelines around this, you’ll be causing problems for the subset of your users that have less reserve in this area.
Readit News
I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.
Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
[+] Yes they use scare tactics but come on, they're easy to ignore. Who cares it's the only available room and 500 people are looking at it right now and 5 of them are already typing in the credit card details? Not me. If I can't get that particular room, I'll get another one, whatever. (I guess it also helps that we often book ~1year in advance, so we're reasonably confident that we'll eventually find something).
I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Expedia Group). The apartment that we rented wasn't at all what was advertised, so we left after one night. VRBO first said that because we left voluntarily, there was nothing they could do. After pointing out that we still have our booking as active, they said we need to talk to the owner directly. After pointing out that the owner is just ignoring our messages, they just said that they handle as a middle-man between us and the owner.
After pointing out that the apartment isn't what is advertised, and that the reviews don't even match the property, they said that we agreed to their terms and conditions. I then spend a couple of hours looking at their other terms and conditions, and pointing out that the owner had agreed with these, but that they had broken several of their terms and conditions by apparently using the same listing for multiple properties.
VRBO finally agreed and refunded us their 10% service fee, but claimed that the rest of the money is already with the owner, so we need to talk to them for a refund. (They have ignored us for weeks now)
I'm still baffled that they would handle it this way. First completely dodging any responsibility, only taking some responsibility after highlighting that the owner had broken several of their rules, and only refunding us their service fees. I never paid any money directly to the owner, so I have no clue how the owner will ever refund me.
At this point I don't even really care about the money that was lost, but the fact that both VRBO and the owner are willing to just take my money (1500 EURO), for a single night in their falsely advertised property infuriates me to no end. And I'm doing anything in my power to make their lives as difficult as possible.
Consider yourself lucky. For me it was 20eur take it or leave it, on 500eur loss.
<rant> I consider cancellation/refund policies that end before your arrival technically - a scam. The situation was like that - the apartment was booked with cancellation available 3 (or smth) days before arrival [0]. Upon arrival - the place was cigarette reeking, bedbug infested, with 30 year old completely worn out mattresses disgusting place. Owner says - "sorry - no refunds" [1], booking says - "we talked to the owner, cancellation policy has ended, the reviews are above average" [2][3]. Upon other calls they gave me 20eur. Bank could not issue a refund, because everything was up to policy.
Though I still use booking.com. I learned to ignore those dark patterns, because it's obvious that 1 spot is left for an apartment, there are no more to it :) . I had only 1 horrible experience with them, but had much worse with AirBNB. Booking.com is great to search all types of accommodation and it's often possible to find a way to book directly and for cheaper, so using it sort of as a search engine. </rant>
[0] from my experience it's usually like that, cancellations/refunds until your arrival usually add exorbitant amounts to the price
[1] though owner suggested ordering cleaning services, but that place needed crime scene level cleaning and complete refurbishment
[2] lesson learned: always sort reviews by newest and translate from foreign languages, because newest 3 reviews were horrifying. But I have not read them, because have not translated them, or have not seen them. Because default sorting shows by "relevant", i.e. foreign language reviews are on the bottom and the other sort order is a mystery to me.
[3] it seams that people do not know how to vote in reviews. If you returned from vacation and infested your own home with bed bugs, and had multitude of other problems - do not give 7 or 8 as a review score - give it a 1. Booking.com used those reviews against me - "if it's above 8 - we cannot do anything about it".
However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it.
Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
The hotel was very helpful, and we cancelled the booking both from our, as well as the hotel’s side. Nonetheless it took Booking.com days to decide that the refund was legitimate.
> As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates.
> Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest:
* Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform;
* Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards;
* Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results;
* Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount;
* Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference;
* Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way;
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_...
Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.
This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive.
Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged.
Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
Companies constantly push the legal boundary.
In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price.
I've only heard this in relation to physical stores though, not sure how it works for e-commerce.
In the UK, that's a criminal offence.
* search hotel at booking.com
* find that hotel at google
* call them directly, by actual phone
You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.
1) you will talk to a human
2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.)
3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0]
4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days)
[0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered
[1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
* Find them at Google
* Call them directly
* Get a super expensive price and a tip to book online
I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
Quite often I get a lower price or free goodies (ie. a bottle of wine) because I skipped booking.com
https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...
Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work.
In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
---
While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams).
I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts.
On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you.
As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered.
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And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived.
And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
It was just an illegal consumer practice.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
Dead Comment
- The majority of 'users currently see this project' are looking a few hours back instead of being 100% fake. All of them allow faking the numbers somehow tho. There are plenty of 100% fake ones out there too tho.
- 'xxx just bought' things are usually real too. But also out of context and time. Plus all plugins I've seen allow you to add custom fake ones. Or even have some preenabled.
- While I was looking for the functionality to actually lock products when they are in a cart for 15 minutes or so because we have limited stock I found none of these plugins is actually doing this. All they do is adding a cookie and a fake timer.
There is more, way more. And I learned to avoid shops using any of those fake tactics.
In the end I wrote many of that stuff my own with real data and I don't think users will ever notice the difference :/
If you implemented the "looking at" functionality, are you keeping a connection open to the client (say, via WS) to determine if they are still looking as in keeping the tab open (or opencv with camera access to see that they are "actually" looking hehe), or are you just looking a few minutes back instead of hours?
How would one honestly implement this feature anyway?
I would go for the minutes if I were big enough, or maybe a 1 hour time frame.
However I opted for other signals that better reflect reality like 'bought X times in the last X days' or 'product is in X wishlists' or 'this product is trending within our visitors'
IMO same effect, but honest and suitable for my size :)
There's no need to put any more thought in than that. It's a single design element, and you're not doing a scientific study or collecting marketing data here. This is fine.
The data was stored in a really inefficient way and so the operation took a stupidly long time. I decided to add a progress bar so that people don't think the app is busted (which they occasionally did). Turned out, much of the time spent was on the server's end, so I couldn't track the majority of the "progress".
I had already put effort into the bar, so I replaced the "real" progress tracking with a script that randomly incremented the progress. I tweaked some heuristics until it roughly matched the amount of time the server tended to take but was random enough to not be super obvious.
After the progress bar launched, someone from the warehouse actually walked up and thanked me for the progress bar.
Of course, that's all fun and games. Weird psychological manipulation in e-commerce is horrible.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequ...
I love the author's rewriting of javascript into "human-readable" code[1], while retaining the same visual style as code written in an editor.
It feels like an excellent way of representing what is inside the programmer's mind when writing the code, and I will probably try to replicate it next time I coach a new student.
[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*aXnY3j41mO3AShqSGiYgBA.png
At first it's "comment only" to describe what I'm trying to achieve and then I'm adding functional code in/around it. I find that really helpful, although some might say there's some "comment bloat" in the end, as I often keep the comments, too.
I think its just their editor's syntax highlighting, likely for Javascript. Highlighting numbers in a different color definitely helps, but highlighting a very small subset (I assume only in and of) of random prepositions doesn't really do much.
Is this even legal? It seems this is used to mislead the customer.
If a company asks me to implement something I believe is illegal I ask for clarifications from a lawyer. Since I wasn't asked to implement this in a "wrong" way, I never looked into it further.
If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7)
If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete.
Sadly, unless its illegal to lie, organizations are disincentivized to do the right thing.
Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion."
It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might, for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this example, it refreshed every time you reloaded the page. If you went back to the product it was a different number. If you HAVE to do this, at least use a cookie or something. The changing number makes the product, and by extension the whole site, look completely suspicious. One of the absolute number one things I want to do on a landing page/PDP is build trust. This falls at the first hurdle.
This wasn't implemented in the UK, but with a little Googling I ended up under the impression it would break trading laws over here.
It seems pretty universal that you aren't allowed to lie to people to make a sale.
When clicking on the 'comments' icon in the article, a sidebar open with the heading Responses (36). I'd not noticed I'd gone offline. After some time, the sidebar updated with There are currently no responses for this story. Be the first to respond. which is incorrect, as there should be 36 responses with the heading still there.
So not only don't have fraudulent counters as mentioned in the article, also provide responses that correctly reflect a state, error, etc, handling the response correctly rather than falling back on an inappropriate default.