• President of UOKiK has imposed more than PLN 100 thousand for unfair practices at the websites of bigotka.pl and arkadie.pl.
• There was no transparent information that a consumer buys at an intermediary.
• Quick shopping was induced by a meter which encouraged to use the same offers anew every day.

Shopping online is an everydayness for many of us - the most popular category comprises clothes and accessories. The Bak Drop (previously Bigotka) company offered a wide assortment of female clothes on its website arkadie.pl, previously bigotka.pl. The websites were presented as an online clothes store and encouraged to do the shopping while to a large extent they were limited to intermediation in shopping, that is, they operated under the dropshipping model. UOKiK has received a number of consumers’ complaints who as late as at the stage of rescission from their contract realised that they had bought their items from an intermediary and the goods purchased must be returned at their own expense to the manufacturer who most frequently resided in China. A consumer using arkadie.pl (before the change of the business name: bigotka.pl) did not have any access to the transparent and unanimous information that those stores had not offer the sales but only the service of intermediation.  

– Consumers using e-commerce must have comprehensive and easy access to information. Willful concealing that an entrepreneur does not run an online store and provides only intermediation services constitutes an unfair market practice. Some reliable information of the actual character of an offer or a type of a contract to be concluded would allow consumers to take a decision on their own relying on the status quo rather than on the one suggested by the entrepreneur. They could join it or rescind of it knowingly and decide to do the shopping at some other stores – says Tomasz Chróstny, President of the UOKiK.

Consumers were misleading not only by way of concealing that the website offered exclusively intermediation services but additionally by way of application of the so-called time-limited promotion. Next to the offer you could see a meter which counted hours left until the end of the discount validity. Every day, the meter began to count anew and started to count the time of a subsequent alleged special offer. Such an operation made an impression that the discount would last short and was significantly limited in time. A kind of a time pressure induced consumers to take prompt, snap purchase decisions. This is an example of a so-called dark-patterns, that is, the practices using socio-techniques and the knowledge of users’ behaviour to affect their decisions and manipulate the decision-taking process.

President of UOKiK has fined the Bak Drop company with more than PLN 100 thousand (PLN 100,710) and has ordered to cease to apply the unfair practices immediately. The decision is not final and may be appealed against to the Court of Competition and Consumer Protection.

Consumer, find out more about risks related to dark patterns and dropshipping. We encourage you to watch the webinars available at: www.infoliniakonsumencka.pl/webinary-podcasty.