Imagine scrolling through a food delivery menu, placing your order and even tracking its delivery — only that the transaction simply never goes through, and you ‘fulfill’ your ritual of ordering without the calories or the bill.
Welcome to the world of ‘dopamine websites’, currently a rage in South Korea, that allow users to simulate the online shopping experience and get the dopamine hit when making an impulsive purchase. Taking the window shopping experience online, these quirky, virtual platforms often offer hyper-realistic mockups of food delivery apps or shopping sites, albeit the last and often regretful step of receiving the product and making a payment.
Dopamine is often referred to as the brain’s ‘pleasure chemical’ — it plays a role in motivation, learning and anticipation of rewards. “The excitement of shopping often peaks before a purchase is completed,” explains an online article.
These platforms came into focus when a fake food delivery app, FoodWontCome, was launched in South Korea recently. Available for download on Google Play Store in India as well, the platform allows users to scroll through food options, read reviews, compare restaurants, and also place their orders. Hitting the ‘Place Order’ button is followed by a confirmation of the order, and a live tracking display of the food leaving the restaurant and moving towards the location. This scratches the itch of flipping open a food delivery app on a whim to fulfill a typical midnight craving.
However, the food never arrives at the doorstep and no money is spent on the order placed.
Rise of Tactile Simulations
Several other platforms have set up similar simulations for the online retail shopping experience as well. People can now scroll through and peruse styles and outfits, save them in their carts, and place and confirm their orders as well. They enter a delivery address and the fake journey of the product from the warehouse to the user’s home begins. Some of these sites also provide the user with an estimate of how much money they saved at the last step, by not spending any real money on the purchase.
The dopamine websites are reminiscent of the ‘fake phones’ that made an appearance last year. An American startup came out with a glass tablet in the shape of a typical iPhone for people to toy with when they feel the impulse to scroll.
The product was a translucent flat glass plate, which mimicked the weight, feel and textures of an iPhone. Much like a fidget spinner, it was launched to recreate the tactile experience of holding a phone and doomscrolling — meant for people trying to reduce their screen time. A review by a user who tested the product for the founder said on her Instagram account that though the product did not help her to reduce the time spent on her real phone, it helped to start a conversation about phone addiction.
Priced at $20, the product, however, did not do too well in the market.
Experts as well as online discourses on Reddit and other platforms have a similar opinion for dopamine sites, saying that they are unsustainable in the long run. The product’s popularity would not fly especially in Western markets, as users have dismissed the fake experience as uncalled for, and a waste of time.
Experts have also opined that these dopamine sites do not curb the impulse or address the real psychological trigger that moves people to make unnecessary and hasty purchases, because the process still takes them through the same mental journey, only without the payoff.
Some discourses across social media platforms have taken it further, saying that the rise of dopamine sites is more of a move to gain users’ buying patterns to then use them to present targeted ads, exacerbating the issue further. What remains to be seen is if this trend from South Korea picks up elsewhere, or if it fizzles out as users get bored of ‘faking it’.