I don't have any evidence to back this up, but in my recollection, that is the case. But it's hard to even compare e-commerce now to back before Amazon, when the web was much more niche and a lot of dark patterns weren't even technically possible yet.
It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.
It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.