Consumers’ attitude to manipulating consumers in electronic commerce

Abstract

The e-commerce has various methods how to attract the consumers and use various models of manipulating consumers that are called dark patterns. The topic of manipulating consumers has been analysed in the scientific literature; the research on the impact of manipulating consumers has been carried out, but the scope of research is not sufficient. This article serves to expand understanding the consumers’ attitude to manipulating consumers in e-commerce, to find out the scope of manipulation they consider to be applied on them, and to analyse the encountered manipulation situations and their impact. The results reveal the strength of impact of manipulative situations and the degree of manipulations.