When adding an item at “60% discount” to your online shopping cart, have you wondered if the original price is actually what the website shows? Or have you had to scroll endlessly because the search results that showed up first were too expensive or did not match your query exactly? The government has now come up with rules to curb some of these practices.
The Department of Consumer Affairs has amended the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 to strengthen “consumer protection while facilitating a transparent and balanced regulatory framework for the e-commerce sector”, according to a release by the Press Information Bureau (PIB). The new rules will come into force on January 1, 2027.
Here are the nine key changes and what they mean for consumers.
You will be able to see the real ‘old’ price
The amended rules say that whenever a price reduction is announced, platforms must display both the reduced price and the “prior price”. The PIB release specifies that the prior price will mean the “lowest price at which the product or service was offered during the 30 days preceding the announcement.”
This is aimed at making discounts easier to assess. At present, a product may be shown as, say, “50 per cent off” against a High reference price, without a shopper necessarily knowing whether it was actually sold at that price recently.
Platforms cannot manipulate search results
The amended rules prohibit e-commerce entities from manipulating search results in a way that misleads users or adversely affects the relevance of results to their search query.
This matters because search ranking determines what shoppers see first. A platform may have many products matching a search, but the order in which they appear can influence what gets clicked and bought. A platform can choose to show a more expensive product, or one from an in-house manufacturer, rather than one that best matches the user’s query at the lowest price.
Paid or sponsored listings will have to be identified through “clear and prominent disclosures”, according to the PIB.
E-commerce entities will have to comply with the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, conduct a self-audit Every year and prominently display a certificate of compliance.
Dark patterns are design techniques that manipulate users into making choices they did not necessarily intend to make. The 2023 guidelines cover practices such as false urgency, adding unwanted items during checkout (“basket sneaking”), making cancellation unnecessarily difficult, disguising advertisements and hiding important information.
The new rules therefore do not create the concept of dark patterns from scratch; rather, they bring compliance with the existing 2023 guidelines more explicitly into the e-commerce rules.
Annexure-1 of The Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, have a list of specified dark patterns. These are false urgency; basket sneaking; confirm shaming; forced action; subscription trap; interface interference; bait and switch; drip pricing; disguise advertisement; nagging; trick question; Saas billing; and rogue malwares. To learn more about these dark patterns, read our explainer here .
Consumers will get a copy of their complaint
