It IS a dark pattern when they don't show you that cost until the final step after you have invested time getting there. You misunderstand, I'm not arguing that it costs money to ship things, I understand that to be true, I'm saying it's a shitty dark pattern when you aren't clear about that cost up front in the funnel. People can be honest, there is nothing stopping them from doing that.
They don't know the cost to ship you things until they know what's going to be in your cart and what address it's getting mailed to. Shipping costs are based on package dimensions, weight, and distance between the sender and recipient. This is the reason that in nearly every ecommerce platform, shipping costs get displayed at the second to last step of the checkout process, or in the shopping cart only if you provide your zip code there. They don't have the information needed to run a postage quote any earlier.
Again, you still aren't following. I'm saying many sites don't do that. You are correct, I should be able to see estimated shipping from my cart on any e-commerce site by just putting in a zip code in, and them knowing what is in my cart (product wise). It's a dark pattern that MANY sites don't do this, they make you fill out a ton of info to get to that point. It's sketchy and a dark pattern to put that many walls behind a final price including shipping. I understand there has to be a few walls, but you wouldn't believe how many sites put extra walls in there to try to "trap" you in their funnel.
Where you see dark pattern is in fact a limitation of most ecommerce platforms. Shopify, which powers millions of retailers website, doesn't offer this out of the box. You need the advanced plan ($$) and on top of that you need a special app/theme that would allow you to do it before checkout.
Yeah but to be fair, nothing stops them from providing the "shipping cost" or an estimate of it, next to the price of the product. They make no effort to kinda tell you how much this thing would cost to deliver.
Heck, they could show you "current shipping cost" estimate next to your cart total. They could also show you the delivery cost total if you were to add this item, next to the item you intend to buy.
It can be a solved problem if they attempted to do so, and as technical people we should be able to identify their BS when we see it. Even giant/big retailers don't do it because they know that greater than zero amount of people will just say "fuck it, I spent all this time filling the cart, I'm not going to bargain shop shipping prices, might as well buy it from here."
